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Considerations on Representative Government

by John Stuart Mill · English · Gutenberg #5669 · 584,038 chars · public domain (US)

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Title: Considerations on Representative Government

Author: John Stuart Mill


        
Release date: May 1, 2004 [eBook #5669]
                Most recently updated: August 13, 2012

Language: English

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Credits: Produced by Curtis A. Weyant and David Widger


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CONSIDERATIONS ON REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT ***




Produced by Curtis A. Weyant








CONSIDERATIONS ON REPRESENTATIVE GOVERNMENT

By John Stuart Mill


Author Of "A System Of Logic, Ratiocinative And Inductive"



[Redactor's note: Italics are indicated by underscores surrounding the
_italicized text_.]

[Footnotes initially found throughout the text have been numbered and
placed at the end of the text.]




Preface


Those who have done me the honor of reading my previous writings will
probably receive no strong impression of novelty from the present
volume; for the principles are those to which I have been working up
during the greater part of my life, and most of the practical
suggestions have been anticipated by others or by myself. There is
novelty, however, in the fact of bringing them together, and
exhibiting them in their connection, and also, I believe, in much that
is brought forward in their support. Several of the opinions at all
events, if not new, are for the present as little likely to meet with
general acceptance as if they were.

It seems to me, however, from various indications, and from none more
than the recent debates on Reform of Parliament, that both
Conservatives and Liberals (if I may continue to call them what they
still call themselves) have lost confidence in the political creeds
which they nominally profess, while neither side appears to have made
any progress in providing itself with a better. Yet such a better
doctrine must be possible; not a mere compromise, by splitting the
difference between the two, but something wider than either, which, in
virtue of its superior comprehensiveness, might be adopted by either
Liberal or Conservative without renouncing any thing which he really
feels to be valuable in his own creed. When so many feel obscurely the
want of such a doctrine, and so few even flatter themselves that they
have attained it, any one may without presumption, offer what his own
thoughts, and the best that he knows of those of others, are able to
contribute towards its formation.




LIST OF CONTENTS


CHAP.  I.
  To What Extent Forms of Government Are a Matter of Choice.

CHAP.  II.
  The Criterion of a Good Form of Government.

CHAP.  III.
  That the Ideally Best Form of Government is Representative
  Government.

CHAP.  IV.
  Under What Social Conditions Representative Government is
  Inapplicable.

CHAP.  V.
  Of the Proper Functions of Representative Bodies.

CHAP.  VI.
  Of the Infirmities and Dangers to Which Representative Government
  Is Liable.

CHAP.  VII.
  Of True and False Democracy; Representation of All, and
  Representation of the Majority Only.

CHAP.  VIII.
  Of the Extension of the Suffrage.

CHAP.  IX.
  Should There Be Two Stages of Election?

CHAP.  X.
  Of the Mode of Voting.

CHAP.  XI.
  Of the Duration of Parliaments.

CHAP.  XII.
  Ought Pledges to Be Required from Members of Parliament.

CHAP.  XIII.
  Of a Second Chamber.

CHAP.  XIV.
  Of the Executive in a Representative Government.

CHAP.  XV.
  Of Local Representative Bodies.

CHAP.  XVI.
  Of Nationality as Connected with Representative Government.

CHAP.  XVII.
  Of Federal Representative Governments.

CHAP.  XVIII.
  Of the Government of Dependencies by a Free State.




Chapter I--To What Extent Forms of Government are a Matter of Choice.


All speculations concerning forms of government bear the impress, more
or less exclusive, of two conflicting theories respecting political
institutions; or, to speak more properly, conflicting conceptions of
what political institutions are.

By some minds, government is conceived as strictly a practical art,
giving rise to no questions but those of means and an end. Forms of
government are assimilated to any other expedients for the attainment
of human objects. They are regarded as wholly an affair of invention
and contrivance. Being made by man, it is assumed that man has the
choice either to make them or not, and how or on what pattern they
shall be made. Government, according to this conception, is a problem,
to be worked like any other question of business. The first step is to
define the purposes which governments are required to promote. The
next, is to inquire what form of government is best fitted to fulfill
those purposes. Having satisfied ourselves on these two points, and
ascertained the form of government which combines the greatest amount
of good with the least of evil, what further remains is to obtain the
concurrence of our countrymen, or those for whom the institutions are
intended, in the opinion which we have privately arrived at. To find
the best form of government; to persuade others that it is the best;
and, having done so, to stir them up to insist on having it, is the
order of ideas in the minds of those who adopt this view of political
philosophy. They look upon a constitution in the same light
(difference of scale being allowed for) as they would upon a steam
plow, or a threshing machine.

To these stand opposed another kind of political reasoners, who are so
far from assimilating a form of government to a machine, that they
regard it as a sort of spontaneous product, and the science of
government as a branch (so to speak) of natural history. According to
them, forms of government are not a matter of choice. We must take
them, in the main, as we find them. Governments can not be constructed
by premeditated design. They "are not made, but grow." Our business
with them, as with the other facts of the universe, is to acquaint
ourselves with their natural properties, and adapt ourselves to them.
The fundamental political institutions of a people are considered by
this school as a sort of organic growth from the nature and life of
that people; a product of their habits, instincts, and unconscious
wants and desires, scarcely at all of their deliberate purposes. Their
will has had no part in the matter but that of meeting the necessities
of the moment by the contrivances of the moment, which contrivances,
if in sufficient conformity to the national feelings and character,
commonly last, and, by successive aggregation, constitute a polity
suited to the people who possess it, but which it would be vain to
attempt to superinduce upon any people whose nature and circumstances
had not spontaneously evolved it.

It is difficult to decide which of these doctrines would be the most
absurd, if we could suppose either of them held as an exclusive
theory. But the principles which men profess, on any controverted
subject, are usually a very incomplete exponent of the opinions they
really hold. No one believes that every people is capable of working
every sort of institution. Carry the analogy of mechanical
contrivances as far as we will, a man does not choose even an
instrument of timber and iron on the sole ground that it is in itself
the best. He considers whether he possesses the other requisites which
must be combined with it to render its employment advantageous, and,
in particular whether those by whom it will have to be worked possess
the knowledge and skill necessary for its management. On the other
hand, neither are those who speak of institutions as if they were a
kind of living organisms really the political fatalists they give
themselves out to be. They do not pretend that mankind have absolutely
no range of choice as to the government they will live under, or that
a consideration of the consequences which flow from different forms of
polity is no element at all in deciding which of them should be
preferred. But, though each side greatly exaggerates its own theory,
out of opposition to the other, and no one holds without modification
to either, the two doctrines correspond to a deep-seated difference
between two modes of thought; and though it is evident that neither of
these is entirely in the right, yet it being equally evident that
neither is wholly in the wrong, we must endeavour to get down to what
is at the root of each, and avail ourselves of the amount of truth
which exists in either.

Let us remember, then, in the first place, that political institutions
(however the proposition may be at times ignored) are the work of
men--owe their origin and their whole existence to human will. Men did
not wake on a summer morning and find them sprung up. Neither do they
resemble trees, which, once planted, "are aye growing" while men "are
sleeping." In every stage of their existence they are made what they
are by human voluntary agency. Like all things, therefore, which are
made by men, they may be either well or ill made; judgment and skill
may have been exercised in their production, or the reverse of these.
And again, if a people have omitted, or from outward pressure have not
had it in their power to give themselves a constitution by the
tentative process of applying a corrective to each evil as it arose,
or as the sufferers gained strength to resist it, this retardation of
political progress is no doubt a great disadvantage to them, but it
does not prove that what has been found good for others would not have
been good also for them, and will not be so still when they think fit
to adopt it.

On the other hand, it is also to be borne in mind that political
machinery does not act of itself. As it is first made, so it has to be
worked, by men, and even by ordinary men. It needs, not their simple
acquiescence, but their active participation; and must be adjusted to
the capacities and qualities of such men as are available. This
implies three conditions. The people for whom the form of government
is intended must be willing to accept it, or, at least not so
unwilling as to oppose an insurmountable obstacle to its
establishment. They must be willing and able to do what is necessary
to keep it standing. And they must be willing and able to do what it
requires of them to enable it to fulfill its purposes. The word "do"
is to be understood as including forbearances as well as acts. They
must be capable of fulfilling the conditions of action and the
conditions of self-restraint, which are necessary either for keeping
the established polity in existence, or for enabling it to achieve the
ends, its conduciveness to which forms its recommendation.

The failure of any of these conditions renders a form of government,
whatever favorable promise it may otherwise hold out, unsuitable to
the particular case.

The first obstacle, the repugnance of the people to the particular
form of government, needs little illustration, because it never can in
theory have been overlooked. The case is of perpetual occurrence.
Nothing but foreign force would induce a tribe of North American
Indians to submit to the restraints of a regular and civilized
government. The same might have been said, though somewhat less
absolutely, of the barbarians who overran the Roman Empire. It
required centuries of time, and an entire change of circumstances, to
discipline them into regular obedience even to their own leaders, when
not actually serving under their banner. There are nations who will
not voluntarily submit to any government but that of certain families,
which have from time immemorial had the privilege of supplying them
with chiefs. Some nations could not, except by foreign conquest, be
made to endure a monarchy; others are equally averse to a republic.
The hindrance often amounts, for the time being, to impracticability.

But there are also cases in which, though not averse to a form of
government--possibly even desiring it--a people may be unwilling or
unable to fulfill its conditions. They may be incapable of fulfilling
such of them as are necessary to keep the government even in nominal
existence. Thus a people may prefer a free government; but if, from
indolence, or carelessness, or cowardice, or want of public spirit,
they are unequal to the exertions necessary for preserving it; if they
will not fight for it when it is directly attacked; if they can be
deluded by the artifices used to cheat them out of it; if, by
momentary discouragement, or temporary panic, or a fit of enthusiasm
for an individual, they can be induced to lay their liberties at the
feet even of a great man, or trust him with powers which enable him to
subvert their institutions--in all these cases they are more or less
unfit for liberty; and though it may be for their good to have had it
even for a short time, they are unlikely long to enjoy it. Again, a
people may be unwilling or unable to fulfill the duties which a
particular form of government requires of them. A rude people, though
in some degree alive to the benefits of civilized society, may be
unable to practice the forbearances which it demands; their passions
may be too violent, or their personal pride too exacting, to forego
private conflict, and leave to the laws the avenging of their real or
supposed wrongs. In such a case, a civilized government, to be really
advantageous to them, will require to be in a considerable degree
despotic; one over which they do not themselves exercise control, and
which imposes a great amount of forcible restraint upon their actions.
Again, a people must be considered unfit for more than a limited and
qualified freedom who will not co-operate actively with the law and
the public authorities in the repression of evil-doers. A people who
are more disposed to shelter a criminal than to apprehend him; who,
like the Hindoos, will perjure themselves to screen the man who has
robbed them, rather than take trouble or expose themselves to
vindictiveness by giving evidence against him; who, like some nations
of Europe down to a recent date, if a man poniards another in the
public street, pass by on the other side, because it is the business
of the police to look to the matter, and it is safer not to interfere
in what does not concern them; a people who are revolted by an
execution, but not shocked at an assassination--require that the
public authorities should be armed with much sterner powers of
repression than elsewhere, since the first indispensable requisites of
civilized life have nothing else to rest on. These deplorable states
of feeling, in any people who have emerged from savage life, are, no
doubt, usually the consequence of previous bad government, which has
taught them to regard the law as made for other ends than their good,
and its administrators as worse enemies than those who openly violate
it. But, however little blame may be due to those in whom these mental
habits have grown up, and however the habits may be ultimately
conquerable by better government, yet, while they exist, a people so
disposed can not be governed with as little power exercised over them
as a people whose sympathies are on the side of the law, and who are
willing to give active assistance in its enforcement. Again,
representative institutions are of little value, and may be a mere
instrument of tyranny or intrigue, when the generality of electors are
not sufficiently interested in their own government to give their
vote, or, if they vote at all, do not bestow their suffrages on public
grounds, but sell them for money, or vote at the beck of some one who
has control over them, or whom for private reasons they desire to
propitiate. Popular election thus practiced, instead of a security
against misgovernment, is but an additional wheel in its machinery.

Besides these moral hindrances, mechanical difficulties are often an
insuperable impediment to forms of government. In the ancient world,
though there might be, and often was, great individual or local
independence, there could be nothing like a regulated popular
government beyond the bounds of a single city-community; because there
did not exist the physical conditions for the formation and
propagation of a public opinion, except among those who could be
brought together to discuss public matters in the same agora. This
obstacle is generally thought to have ceased by the adoption of the
representative system. But to surmount it completely, required the
press, and even the newspaper press, the real equivalent, though not
in all respects an adequate one, of the Pnyx and the Forum. There have
been states of society in which even a monarchy of any great
territorial extent could not subsist, but unavoidably broke up into
petty principalities, either mutually independent, or held together by
a loose tie like the feudal: because the machinery of authority was
not perfect enough to carry orders into effect at a great distance
from the person of the ruler. He depended mainly upon voluntary
fidelity for the obedience even of his army, nor did there exist the
means of making the people pay an amount of taxes sufficient for
keeping up the force necessary to compel obedience throughout a large
territory. In these and all similar cases, it must be understood that
the amount of the hindrance may be either greater or less. It may be
so great as to make the form of government work very ill, without
absolutely precluding its existence, or hindering it from being
practically preferable to any other which can be had. This last
question mainly depends upon a consideration which we have not yet
arrived at--the tendencies of different forms of government to promote
Progress.

We have now examined the three fundamental conditions of the
adaptation of forms of government to the people who are to be governed
by them. If the supporters of what may be termed the naturalistic
theory of politics, mean but to insist on the necessity of these three
conditions; if they only mean that no government can permanently exist
which does not fulfill the first and second conditions, and, in some
considerable measure, the third; their doctrine, thus limited, is
incontestable. Whatever they mean more than this appears to me
untenable. All that we are told about the necessity of an historical
basis for institutions, of their being in harmony with the national
usages and character, and the like, means either this, or nothing to
the purpose. There is a great quantity of mere sentimentality
connected with these and similar phrases, over and above the amount of
rational meaning contained in them. But, considered practically, these
alleged requisites of political institutions are merely so many
facilities for realising the three conditions. When an institution, or
a set of institutions, has the way prepared for it by the opinions,
tastes, and habits of the people, they are not only more easily
induced to accept it, but will more easily learn, and will be, from
the beginning, better disposed, to do what is required of them both
for the preservation of the institutions, and for bringing them into
such action as enables them to produce their best results. It would be
a great mistake in any legislator not to shape his measures so as to
take advantage of such pre-existing habits and feelings when
available. On the other hand, it is an exaggeration to elevate these
mere aids and facilities into necessary conditions. People are more
easily induced to do, and do more easily, what they are already used
to; but people also learn to do things new to them. Familiarity is a
great help; but much dwelling on an idea will make it familiar, even
when strange at first. There are abundant instances in which a whole
people have been eager for untried things. The amount of capacity
which a people possess for doing new things, and adapting themselves
to new circumstances; is itself one of the elements of the question.
It is a quality in which different nations, and different stages of
civilization, differ much from one another. The capability of any
given people for fulfilling the conditions of a given form of
government can not be pronounced on by any sweeping rule. Knowledge of
the particular people, and general practical judgment and sagacity,
must be the guides.

There is also another consideration not to be lost sight of. A people
may be unprepared for good institutions; but to kindle a desire for
them is a necessary part of the preparation. To recommend and advocate
a particular institution or form of government, and set its advantages
in the strongest light, is one of the modes, often the only mode
within reach, of educating the mind of the nation not only for
accepting or claiming, but also for working, the institution. What
means had Italian patriots, during the last and present generation, of
preparing the Italian people for freedom in unity, but by inciting
them to demand it? Those, however, who undertake such a task, need to
be duly impressed, not solely with the benefits of the institution or
polity which they recommend, but also with the capacities, moral,
intellectual, and active, required for working it; that they may
avoid, if possible, stirring up a desire too much in advance of the
capacity.

The result of what has been said is, that, within the limits set by
the three conditions so often adverted to, institutions and forms of
government are a matter of choice. To inquire into the best form of
government in the abstract (as it is called) is not a chimerical, but
a highly practical employment of scientific intellect; and to
introduce into any country the best institutions which, in the
existing state of that country, are capable of, in any tolerable
degree, fulfilling the conditions, is one of the most rational
objects to which practical effort can address itself. Every thing
which can be said by way of disparaging the efficacy of human will and
purpose in matters of government might be said of it in every other of
its applications. In all things there are very strict limits to human
power. It can only act by wielding some one or more of the forces of
nature. Forces, therefore, that can be applied to the desired use must
exist; and will only act according to their own laws. We can not make
the river run backwards; but we do not therefore say that watermills
"are not made, but grow." In politics, as in mechanics, the power
which is to keep the engine going must be sought for _outside_ the
machinery; and if it is not forthcoming, or is insufficient to
surmount the obstacles which may reasonably be expected, the
contrivance will fail. This is no peculiarity of the political art;
and amounts only to saying that it is subject to the same limitations
and conditions as all other arts.

At this point we are met by another objection, or the same objection
in a different form. The forces, it is contended, on which the greater
political phenomena depend, are not amenable to the direction of
politicians or philosophers. The government of a country, it is
affirmed, is, in all substantial respects, fixed and determined
beforehand by the state of the country in regard to the distribution
of the elements of social power. Whatever is the strongest power in
society will obtain the governing authority; and a change in the
political constitution can not be durable unless preceded or
accompanied by an altered distribution of power in society itself. A
nation, therefore, can not choose its form of government. The mere
details, and practical organization, it may choose; but the essence of
the whole, the seat of the supreme power, is determined for it by
social circumstances.

That there is a portion of truth in this doctrine I at once admit; but
to make it of any use, it must be reduced to a distinct expression and
proper limits. When it is said that the strongest power in society
will make itself strongest in the government, what is meant by power?
Not thews and sinews; otherwise pure democracy would be the only form
of polity that could exist. To mere muscular strength, add two other
elements, property and intelligence, and we are nearer the truth, but
far from having yet reached it. Not only is a greater number often
kept down by a less, but the greater number may have a preponderance
in property, and individually in intelligence, and may yet be held in
subjection, forcibly or otherwise, by a minority in both respects
inferior to it. To make these various elements of power politically
influential they must be organized; and the advantage in organization
is necessarily with those who are in possession of the government. A
much weaker party in all other elements of power may greatly
preponderate when the powers of government are thrown into the scale;
and may long retain its predominance through this alone: though, no
doubt, a government so situated is in the condition called in
mechanics unstable equilibrium, like a thing balanced on its smaller
end, which, if once disturbed, tends more and more to depart from,
instead of reverting to, its previous state.

But there are still stronger objections to this theory of government
in the terms in which it is usually stated. The power in society which
has any tendency to convert itself into political power is not power
quiescent, power merely passive, but active power; in other words,
power actually exerted; that is to say, a very small portion of all
the power in existence. Politically speaking, a great part of all
power consists in will. How is it possible, then, to compute the
elements of political power, while we omit from the computation any
thing which acts on the will? To think that, because those who wield
the power in society wield in the end that of government, therefore it
is of no use to attempt to influence the constitution of the
government by acting on opinion, is to forget that opinion is itself
one of the greatest active social forces. One person with a belief is
a social power equal to ninety-nine who have only interests. They who
can succeed in creating a general persuasion that a certain form of
government, or social fact of any kind, deserves to be preferred, have
made nearly the most important step which can possibly be taken toward
ranging the powers of society on its side. On the day when the
protomartyr was stoned to death at Jerusalem, while he who was to be
the Apostle of the Gentiles stood by "consenting unto his death,"
would any one have supposed that the party of that stoned man were
then and there the strongest power in society? And has not the event
proved that they were so? Because theirs was the most powerful of then
existing beliefs. The same element made a monk of Wittenberg, at the
meeting of the Diet of Worms, a more powerful social force than the
Emperor Charles the Fifth, and all the princes there assembled. But
these, it may be said, are cases in which religion was concerned, and
religious convictions are something peculiar in their strength. Then
let us take a case purely political, where religion, if concerned at
all, was chiefly on the losing side. If any one requires to be
convinced that speculative thought is one of the chief elements of
social power, let him bethink himself of the age in which there was
scarcely a throne in Europe which was not filled by a liberal and
reforming king, a liberal and reforming emperor, or, strangest of all,
a liberal and reforming pope; the age of Frederic the Great, of
Catherine the Second, of Joseph the Second, of Peter Leopold, of
Benedict XIV., of Ganganelli, of Pombal, of D'Aranda; when the very
Bourbons of Naples were liberals and reformers, and all the active
minds among the noblesse of France were filled with the ideas which
were soon after to cost them so dear. Surely a conclusive example how
far mere physical and economic power is from being the whole of social
power. It was not by any change in the distribution of material
interests, but by the spread of moral convictions, that negro slavery
has been put an end to in the British Empire and elsewhere. The serfs
in Russia owe their emancipation, if not to a sentiment of duty, at
least to the growth of a more enlightened opinion respecting the true
interest of the state. It is what men think that determines how they
act; and though the persuasions and convictions of average men are in
a much greater degree determined by their personal position than by
reason, no little power is exercised over them by the persuasions and
convictions of those whose personal position is different, and by the
united authority of the instructed. When, therefore, the instructed in
general can be brought to recognize one social arrangement, or
political or other institution, as good, and another as bad--one as
desirable, another as condemnable, very much has been done towards
giving to the one, or withdrawing from the other, that preponderance
of social force which enables it to subsist. And the maxim, that the
government of a country is what the social forces in existence compel
it to be, is true only in the sense in which it favors, instead of
discouraging, the attempt to exercise, among all forms of government
practicable in the existing condition of society, a rational choice.



Chapter II--The Criterion of a Good Form of Government.


The form of government for any given country being (within certain
definite conditions) amenable to choice, it is now to be considered by
what test the choice should be directed; what are the distinctive
characteristics of the form of government best fitted to promote the
interests of any given society.

Before entering into this inquiry, it may seem necessary to decide
what are the proper functions of government; for, government
altogether being only a means, the eligibility of the means must
depend on their adaptation to the end. But this mode of stating the
problem gives less aid to its investigation than might be supposed,
and does not even bring the whole of the question into view. For, in
the first place, the proper functions of a government are not a fixed
thing, but different in different states of society; much more
extensive in a backward than in an advanced state. And, secondly, the
character of a government or set of political institutions can not be
sufficiently estimated while we confine our attention to the
legitimate sphere of governmental functions; for, though the goodness
of a government is necessarily circumscribed within that sphere, its
badness unhappily is not. Every kind and degree of evil of which
mankind are susceptible may be inflicted on them by their government,
and none of the good which social existence is capable of can be any
further realized than as the constitution of the government is
compatible with, and allows scope for, its attainment. Not to speak of
indirect effects, the direct meddling of the public authorities has no
necessary limits but those of human life, and the influence of
government on the well-being of society can be considered or estimated
in reference to nothing less than the whole of the interests of
humanity.

Being thus obliged to place before ourselves, as the test of good and
bad government, so complex an object as the aggregate interests of
society, we would willingly attempt some kind of classification of
those interests, which, bringing them before the mind in definite
groups, might give indication of the qualities by which a form of
government is fitted to promote those various interests respectively.
It would be a great facility if we could say the good of society
consists of such and such elements; one of these elements requires
such conditions, another such others; the government, then, which
unites in the greatest degree all these conditions, must be the best.
The theory of government would thus be built up from the separate
theorems of the elements which compose a good state of society.

Unfortunately, to enumerate and classify the constituents of social
well-being, so as to admit of the formation of such theorems is no
easy task. Most of those who, in the last or present generation, have
applied themselves to the philosophy of politics in any comprehensive
spirit, have felt the importance of such a classification, but the
attempts which have been made toward it are as yet limited, so far as
I am aware, to a single step. The classification begins and ends with
a partition of the exigencies of society between the two heads of
Order and Progress (in the phraseology of French thinkers); Permanence
and Progression, in the words of Coleridge. This division is plausible
and seductive, from the apparently clean-cut opposition between its
two members, and the remarkable difference between the sentiments to
which they appeal. But I apprehend that (however admissible for
purposes of popular discourse) the distinction between Order, or
Permanence and Progress, employed to define the qualities necessary in
a government, is unscientific and incorrect.

For, first, what are Order and Progress? Concerning Progress there is
no difficulty, or none which is apparent at first sight. When Progress
is spoken of as one of the wants of human society, it may be supposed
to mean Improvement. That is a tolerably distinct idea. But what is
Order? Sometimes it means more, sometimes less, but hardly ever the
whole of what human society needs except improvement.

In its narrowest acceptation, Order means Obedience. A government is
said to preserve order if it succeeds in getting itself obeyed. But
there are different degrees of obedience, and it is not every degree
that is commendable. Only an unmitigated despotism demands that the
individual citizen shall obey unconditionally every mandate of persons
in authority. We must at least limit the definition to such mandates
as are general, and issued in the deliberate form of laws. Order, thus
understood, expresses, doubtless, an indispensable attribute of
government. Those who are unable to make their ordinances obeyed, can
not be said to govern. But, though a necessary condition, this is not
the object of government. That it should make itself obeyed is
requisite, in order that it may accomplish some other purpose. We are
still to seek what is this other purpose, which government ought to
fulfill abstractedly from the idea of improvement, and which has to be
fulfilled in every society, whether stationary or progressive.

In a sense somewhat more enlarged, Order means the preservation of
peace by the cessation of private violence. Order is said to exist
where the people of the country have, as a general rule, ceased to
prosecute their quarrels by private force, and acquired the habit of
referring the decision of their disputes and the redress of their
injuries to the public authorities. But in this larger use of the
term, as well as in the former narrow one, Order expresses rather one
of the conditions of government, than either its purpose or the
criterion of its excellence; for the habit may be well established of
submitting to the government, and referring all disputed matters to
its authority, and yet the manner in which the government deals with
those disputed matters, and with the other things about which it
concerns itself, may differ by the whole interval which divides the
best from the worst possible.

If we intend to comprise in the idea of Order all that society
requires from its government which is not included in the idea of
Progress, we must define Order as the preservation of all kinds and
amounts of good which already exist, and Progress as consisting in the
increase of them. This distinction does comprehend in one or the other
section every thing which a government can be required to promote.
But, thus understood, it affords no basis for a philosophy of
government. We can not say that, in constituting a polity, certain
provisions ought to be made for Order and certain others for Progress,
since the conditions of Order, in the sense now indicated, and those
of Progress, are not opposite, but the same. The agencies which tend
to preserve the social good which already exists are the very same
which promote the increase of it, and _vice versâ_, the sole
difference being, that a greater degree of those agencies is required
for the latter purpose than for the former.

What, for example, are the qualities in the citizens individually
which conduce most to keep up the amount of good conduct, of good
management, of success and prosperity, which already exist in society?
Every body will agree that those qualities are industry, integrity,
justice, and prudence. But are not these, of all qualities, the most
conducive to improvement? and is not any growth of these virtues in
the community in itself the greatest of improvements? If so, whatever
qualities in the government are promotive of industry, integrity,
justice, and prudence, conduce alike to permanence and to progression,
only there is needed more of those qualities to make the society
decidedly progressive than merely to keep it permanent.

What, again, are the particular attributes in human beings which seem
to have a more especial reference to Progress, and do not so directly
suggest the ideas of Order and Preservation? They are chiefly the
qualities of mental activity, enterprise, and courage. But are not all
these qualities fully as much required for preserving the good we have
as for adding to it? If there is any thing certain in human affairs,
it is that valuable acquisitions are only to be retained by the
continuation of the same energies which gained them. Things left to
take care of themselves inevitably decay. Those whom success induces
to relax their habits of care and thoughtfulness, and their
willingness to encounter disagreeables, seldom long retain their good
fortune at its height. The mental attribute which seems exclusively
dedicated to Progress, and is the culmination of the tendencies to it,
is Originality, or Invention. Yet this is no less necessary for
Permanence, since, in the inevitable changes of human affairs, new
inconveniences and dangers continually grow up, which must be
encountered by new resources and contrivances, in order to keep things
going on even only as well as they did before. Whatever qualities,
therefore, in a government, tend to encourage activity, energy,
courage, originality, are requisites of Permanence as well as of
Progress, only a somewhat less degree of them will, on the average,
suffice for the former purpose than for the latter.

To pass now from the mental to the outward and objective requisites of
society: it is impossible to point out any contrivance in politics, or
arrangement of social affairs, which conduces to Order only, or to
Progress only; whatever tends to either promotes both. Take, for
instance, the common institution of a police. Order is the object
which seems most immediately interested in the efficiency of this part
of the social organization. Yet, if it is effectual to promote Order,
that is, if it represses crime, and enables every one to feel his
person and property secure, can any state of things be more conducive
to Progress? The greater security of property is one of the main
conditions and causes of greater production, which is Progress in its
most familiar and vulgarest aspect. The better repression of crime
represses the dispositions which tend to crime, and this is Progress
in a somewhat higher sense. The release of the individual from the
cares and anxieties of a state of imperfect protection sets his
faculties free to be employed in any new effort for improving his own
state and that of others, while the same cause, by attaching him to
social existence, and making him no longer see present or prospective
enemies in his fellow creatures, fosters all those feelings of
kindness and fellowship towards others, and interest in the general
well-being of the community, which are such important parts of social
improvement.

Take, again, such a familiar case as that of a good system of taxation
and finance. This would generally be classed as belonging to the
province of Order. Yet what can be more conducive to Progress? A
financial system which promotes the one, conduces, by the very same
excellences, to the other. Economy, for example, equally preserves the
existing stock of national wealth, and favors the creation of more. A
just distribution of burdens, by holding up to every citizen an
example of morality and good conscience applied to difficult
adjustments, and an evidence of the value which the highest
authorities attach to them, tends in an eminent degree to educate the
moral sentiments of the community, both in respect of strength and of
discrimination. Such a mode of levying the taxes as does not impede
the industry, or unnecessarily interfere with the liberty of the
citizen, promotes, not the preservation only, but the increase of the
national wealth, and encourages a more active use of the individual
faculties. And _vice versâ_, all errors in finance and taxation which
obstruct the improvement of the people in wealth and morals, tend
also, if of sufficiently serious amount, positively to impoverish and
demoralize them. It holds, in short, universally, that when Order and
Permanence are taken in their widest sense for the stability of
existing advantages, the requisites of Progress are but the requisites
of Order in a greater degree; those of Permanence merely those of
Progress in a somewhat smaller measure.

In support of the position that Order is intrinsically different from
Progress, and that preservation of existing and acquisition of
additional good are sufficiently distinct to afford the basis of a
fundamental classification, we shall perhaps be reminded that Progress
may be at the expense of Order; that while we are acquiring, or
striving to acquire, good of one kind, we may be losing ground in
respect to others; thus there may be progress in wealth, while there
is deterioration in virtue. Granting this, what it proves is, not that
Progress is generically a different thing from Permanence, but that
wealth is a different thing from virtue. Progress is permanence and
something more; and it is no answer to this to say that Progress in
one thing does not imply Permanence in every thing. No more does
Progress in one thing imply Progress in every thing. Progress of any
kind includes Permanence in that same kind: whenever Permanence is
sacrificed to some particular kind of Progress, other Progress is
still more sacrificed to it; and if it be not worth the sacrifice, not
the interest of Permanence alone has been disregarded, but the general
interest of Progress has been mistaken.

If these improperly contrasted ideas are to be used at all in the
attempt to give a first commencement of scientific precision to the
notion of good government, it would be more philosophically correct to
leave out of the definition the word Order, and to say that the best
government is that which is most conducive to Progress. For Progress
includes Order, but Order does not include Progress. Progress is a
greater degree of that of which Order is a less. Order, in any other
sense, stands only for a part of the prerequisites of good government,
not for its idea and essence. Order would find a more suitable place
among the conditions of Progress, since, if we would increase our sum
of good, nothing is more indispensable than to take due care of what
we already have. If we are endeavouring after more riches, our very
first rule should be, not to squander uselessly our existing means.
Order, thus considered, is not an additional end to be reconciled with
Progress, but a part and means of Progress itself. If a gain in one
respect is purchased by a more than equivalent loss in the same or in
any other, there is not Progress. Conduciveness to Progress, thus
understood, includes the whole excellence of a government.

But, though metaphysically defensible, this definition of the
criterion of good government is not appropriate, because, though it
contains the whole of the truth, it recalls only a part. What is
suggested by the term Progress is the idea of moving onward, whereas
the meaning of it here is quite as much the prevention of falling
back. The very same social causes--the same beliefs, feelings,
institutions, and practices--are as much required to prevent society
from retrograding as to produce a further advance. Were there no
improvement to be hoped for, life would not be the less an unceasing
struggle against causes of deterioration, as it even now is. Politics,
as conceived by the ancients, consisted wholly in this. The natural
tendency of men and their works was to degenerate, which tendency,
however, by good institutions virtuously administered, it might be
possible for an indefinite length of time to counteract. Though we no
longer hold this opinion; though most men in the present age profess
the contrary creed, believing that the tendency of things, on the
whole, is toward improvement, we ought not to forget that there is an
incessant and ever-flowing current of human affairs toward the worse,
consisting of all the follies, all the vices, all the negligences,
indolences, and supinenesses of mankind, which is only controlled, and
kept from sweeping all before it, by the exertions which some persons
constantly, and others by fits, put forth in the direction of good and
worthy objects. It gives a very insufficient idea of the importance of
the strivings which take place to improve and elevate human nature and
life to suppose that their chief value consists in the amount of
actual improvement realized by their means, and that the consequence
of their cessation would merely be that we should remain as we are. A
very small diminution of those exertions would not only put a stop to
improvement, but would turn the general tendency of things toward
deterioration, which, once begun, would proceed with increasingly
rapidity, and become more and more difficult to check, until it
reached a state often seen in history, and in which many large
portions of mankind even now grovel; when hardly any thing short of
superhuman power seems sufficient to turn the tide, and give a fresh
commencement to the upward movement.

These reasons make the word Progress as unapt as the terms Order and
Permanence to become the basis for a classification of the requisites
of a form of government. The fundamental antithesis which these words
express does not lie in the things themselves, so much as in the types
of human character which answer to them. There are, we know, some
minds in which caution, and others in which boldness, predominates; in
some, the desire to avoid imperilling what is already possessed is a
stronger sentiment than that which prompts to improve the old and
acquire new advantages; while there are others who lean the contrary
way, and are more eager for future than careful of present good. The
road to the ends of both is the same; but they are liable to wander
from it in opposite directions. This consideration is of importance in
composing the _personnel_ of any political body: persons of both types
ought to be included in it, that the tendencies of each may be
tempered, in so far as they are excessive, by a due proportion of the
other. There needs no express provision to insure this object,
provided care is taken to admit nothing inconsistent with it. The
natural and spontaneous admixture of the old and the young, of those
whose position and reputation are made and those who have them still
to make, will in general sufficiently answer the purpose, if only this
natural balance is not disturbed by artificial regulation.

Since the distinction most commonly adopted for the classification of
social exigencies does not possess the properties needful for that
use, we have to seek for some other leading distinction better adapted
to the purpose. Such a distinction would seem to be indicated by the
considerations to which I now proceed.

If we ask ourselves on what causes and conditions good government in
all its senses, from the humblest to the most exalted, depends, we
find that the principal of them, the one which transcends all others,
is the qualities of the human beings composing the society over which
the government is exercised.

We may take, as a first instance, the administration of justice; with
the more propriety, since there is no part of public business in which
the mere machinery, the rules and contrivances for conducting the
details of the operation, are of such vital consequence. Yet even
these yield in importance to the qualities of the human agents
employed. Of what efficacy are rules of procedure in securing the ends
of justice if the moral condition of the people is such that the
witnesses generally lie, and the judges and their subordinates take
bribes? Again, how can institutions provide a good municipal
administration if there exists such indifference to the subject that
those who would administer honestly and capably can not be induced to
serve, and the duties are left to those who undertake them because
they have some private interest to be promoted? Of what avail is the
most broadly popular representative system if the electors do not care
to choose the best member of Parliament, but choose him who will spend
most money to be elected? How can a representative assembly work for
good if its members can be bought, or if their excitability of
temperament, uncorrected by public discipline or private self-control,
makes them incapable of calm deliberation, and they resort to manual
violence on the floor of the House, or shoot at one another with
rifles? How, again, can government, or any joint concern, be carried
on in a tolerable manner by people so envious that, if one among them
seems likely to succeed in any thing, those who ought to cooperate
with him form a tacit combination to make him fail? Whenever the
general disposition of the people is such that each individual regards
those only of his interests which are selfish, and does not dwell on,
or concern himself for, his share of the general interest, in such a
state of things good government is impossible. The influence of
defects of intelligence in obstructing all the elements of good
government requires no illustration. Government consists of acts done
by human beings; and if the agents, or those who choose the agents, or
those to whom the agents are responsible, or the lookers-on whose
opinion ought to influence and check all these, are mere masses of
ignorance, stupidity, and baleful prejudice, every operation of
government will go wrong; while, in proportion as the men rise above
this standard, so will the government improve in quality up to the
point of excellence, attainable but nowhere attained, where the
officers of government, themselves persons of superior virtue and
intellect, are surrounded by the atmosphere of a virtuous and
enlightened public opinion.

The first element of good government, therefore, being the virtue and
intelligence of the human beings composing the community, the most
important point of excellence which any form of government can possess
is to promote the virtue and intelligence of the people themselves.
The first question in respect to any political institutions is how far
they tend to foster in the members of the community the various
desirable qualities, moral and intellectual, or rather (following
Bentham's more complete classification) moral, intellectual, and
active. The government which does this the best has every likelihood
of being the best in all other respects, since it is on these
qualities, so far as they exist in the people, that all possibility of
goodness in the practical operations of the government depends.

We may consider, then, as one criterion of the goodness of a
government, the degree in which it tends to increase the sum of good
qualities in the governed, collectively and individually, since,
besides that their well-being is the sole object of government, their
good qualities supply the moving force which works the machinery. This
leaves, as the other constituent element of the merit of a government,
the quality of the machinery itself; that is, the degree in which it
is adapted to take advantage of the amount of good qualities which may
at any time exist, and make them instrumental to the right purposes.
Let us again take the subject of judicature as an example and
illustration. The judicial system being given, the goodness of the
administration of justice is in the compound ratio of the worth of the
men composing the tribunals, and the worth of the public opinion which
influences or controls them. But all the difference between a good and
a bad system of judicature lies in the contrivances adopted for
bringing whatever moral and intellectual worth exists in the community
to bear upon the administration of justice, and making it duly
operative on the result. The arrangements for rendering the choice of
the judges such as to obtain the highest average of virtue and
intelligence; the salutary forms of procedure; the publicity which
allows observation and criticism of whatever is amiss; the liberty of
discussion and cinsure through the press; the mode of taking evidence,
according as it is well or ill adapted to elicit truth; the
facilities, whatever be their amount, for obtaining access to the
tribunals; the arrangements for detecting crimes and apprehending
offenders-all these things are not the power, but the machinery for
bringing the power into contact with the obstacle; and the machinery
has no action of itself, but without it the power, let it be ever so
ample, would be wasted and of no effect. A similar distinction exists
in regard to the constitution of the executive departments of
administration. Their machinery is good, when the proper tests are
prescribed for the qualifications of officers, the proper rules for
their promotion; when the business is conveniently distributed among
those who are to transact it, a convenient and methodical order
established for its transaction, a correct and intelligible record
kept of it after being transacted; when each individual knows for what
he is responsible, and is known to others as responsible for it; when
the best-contrived checks are provided against negligence, favoritism,
or jobbery in any of the acts of the department. But political checks
will no more act of themselves than a bridle will direct a horse
without a rider. If the checking functionaries are as corrupt or as
negligent as those whom they ought to check, and if the public, the
mainspring of the whole checking machinery, are too ignorant, too
passive, or too careless and inattentive to do their part, little
benefit will be derived from the best administrative apparatus. Yet a
good apparatus is always preferable to a bad. It enables such
insufficient moving or checking power as exists to act at the greatest
advantage; and without it, no amount of moving or checking power would
be sufficient. Publicity, for instance, is no impediment to evil, nor
stimulus to good, if the public will not look at what is done; but
without publicity, how could they either check or encourage what they
were not permitted to see? The ideally perfect constitution of a
public office is that in which the interest of the functionary is
entirely coincident with his duty. No mere system will make it so, but
still less can it be made so without a system, aptly devised for the
purpose.

What we have said of the arrangements for the detailed administration
of the government is still more evidently true of its general
constitution. All government which aims at being good is an
organization of some part of the good qualities existing in the
individual members of the community for the conduct of its collective
affairs. A representative constitution is a means of bringing the
general standard of intelligence and honesty existing in the
community, and the individual intellect and virtue of its wisest
members, more directly to bear upon the government, and investing them
with greater influence in it than they would have under any other mode
of organization; though, under any, such influence as they do have is
the source of all good that there is in the government, and the
hindrance of every evil that there is not. The greater the amount of
these good qualities which the institutions of a country succeed in
organizing, and the better the mode of organization, the better will
be the government.

We have now, therefore, obtained a foundation for a twofold division
of the merit which any set of political institutions can possess. It
consists partly of the degree in which they promote the general mental
advancement of the community, including under that phrase advancement
in intellect, in virtue, and in practical activity and efficiency, and
partly of the degree of perfection with which they organize the moral,
intellectual, and active worth already existing, so as to operate with
the greatest effect on public affairs. A government is to be judged by
its action upon men and by its action upon things; by what it makes of
the citizens, and what it does with them; its tendency to improve or
deteriorate the people themselves, and the goodness or badness of the
work it performs for them, and by means of them. Government is at once
a great influence acting on the human mind, and a set of organized
arrangements for public business: in the first capacity its beneficial
action is chiefly indirect, but not therefore less vital, while its
mischievous action may be direct.

The difference between these two functions of a government is not,
like that between Order and Progress, a difference merely in degree,
but in kind. We must not, however, suppose that they have no intimate
connection with one another. The institutions which insure the best
management of public affairs practicable in the existing state of
cultivation tend by this alone to the further improvement of that
state. A people which had the most just laws, the purest and most
efficient judicature, the most enlightened administration, the most
equitable and least onerous system of finance, compatible with the
stage it had attained in moral and intellectual advancement, would be
in a fair way to pass rapidly into a higher stage. Nor is there any
mode in which political institutions can contribute more effectually
to the improvement of the people than by doing their more direct work
well. And reversely, if their machinery is so badly constructed that
they do their own particular business ill, the effect is felt in a
thousand ways in lowering the morality and deadening the intelligence
and activity of the people. But the distinction is nevertheless real,
because this is only one of the means by which political institutions
improve or deteriorate the human mind, and the causes and modes of
that beneficial or injurious influence remain a distinct and much
wider subject of study.

Of the two modes of operation by which a form of government or set of
political institutions affects the welfare of the community--its
operation as an agency of national education, and its arrangements for
conducting the collective affairs of the community in the state of
education in which they already are, the last evidently varies much
less, from difference of country and state of civilization, than the
first. It has also much less to do with the fundamental constitution
of the government. The mode of conducting the practical business of
government, which is best under a free constitution, would generally
be best also in an absolute monarchy, only an absolute monarchy is not
so likely to practice it. The laws of property, for example; the
principles of evidence and judicial procedure; the system of taxation
and of financial administration, need not necessarily be different in
different forms of government. Each of these matters has principles
and rules of its own, which are a subject of separate study. General
jurisprudence, civil and penal legislation, financial and commercial
policy, are sciences in themselves, or, rather, separate members of
the comprehensive science or art of government; and the most
enlightened doctrines on all these subjects, though not equally likely
to be understood and acted on under all forms of government, yet, if
understood and acted on, would in general be equally beneficial under
them all. It is true that these doctrines could not be applied without
some modifications to all states of society and of the human mind;
nevertheless, by far the greater number of them would require
modifications solely of detail to adapt them to any state of society
sufficiently advanced to possess rulers capable of understanding them.
A government to which they would be wholly unsuitable must be one so
bad in itself, or so opposed to public feeling, as to be unable to
maintain itself in existence by honest means.

It is otherwise with that portion of the interests of the community
which relate to the better or worse training of the people themselves.
Considered as instrumental to this, institutions need to be radically
different, according to the stage of advancement already reached. The
recognition of this truth, though for the most part empirically rather
than philosophically, may be regarded as the main point of superiority
in the political theories of the present above those of the last age,
in which it was customary to claim representative democracy for
England or France by arguments which would equally have proved it the
only fit form of government for Bedouins or Malays. The state of
different communities, in point of culture and development, ranges
downwards to a condition very little above the highest of the beasts.
The upward range, too, is considerable, and the future possible
extension vastly greater. A community can only be developed out of one
of these states into a higher by a concourse of influences, among the
principal of which is the government to which they are subject. In all
states of human improvement ever yet attained, the nature and degree
of authority exercised over individuals, the distribution of power,
and the conditions of command and obedience, are the most powerful of
the influences, except their religious belief, which make them what
they are, and enable them to become what they can be. They may be
stopped short at any point in their progress by defective adaptation
of their government to that particular stage of advancement. And the
one indispensable merit of a government, in favor of which it may be
forgiven almost any amount of other demerit compatible with progress,
is that its operation on the people is favorable, or not unfavorable,
to the next step which it is necessary for them to take in order to
raise themselves to a higher level.

Thus (to repeat a former example), a people in a state of savage
independence, in which every one lives for himself, exempt, unless by
fits, from any external control, is practically incapable of making
any progress in civilization until it has learned to obey. The
indispensable virtue, therefore, in a government which establishes
itself over a people of this sort is that it make itself obeyed. To
enable it to do this, the constitution of the government must be
nearly, or quite despotic. A constitution in any degree popular,
dependent on the voluntary surrender by the different members of the
community of their individual freedom of action, would fail to enforce
the first lesson which the pupils, in this stage of their progress,
require. Accordingly, the civilization of such tribes, when not the
result of juxtaposition with others already civilized, is almost
always the work of an absolute ruler, deriving his power either from
religion or military prowess--very often from foreign arms.

Again, uncivilized races, and the bravest and most energetic still
more than the rest, are averse to continuous labor of an unexciting
kind. Yet all real civilization is at this price; without such labor,
neither can the mind be disciplined into the habits required by
civilized society, nor the material world prepared to receive it.
There needs a rare concurrence of circumstances, and for that reason
often a vast length of time, to reconcile such a people to industry,
unless they are for a while compelled to it. Hence even personal
slavery, by giving a commencement to industrial life, and enforcing it
as the exclusive occupation of the most numerous portion of the
community, may accelerate the transition to a better freedom than that
of fighting and rapine. It is almost needless to say that this excuse
for slavery is only available in a very early state of society. A
civilized people have far other means of imparting civilization to
those under their influence; and slavery is, in all its details, so
repugnant to that government of law, which is the foundation of all
modern life, and so corrupting to the master-class when they have once
come under civilized influences, that its adoption under any
circumstances whatever in modern society is a relapse into worse than
barbarism.

At some period, however, of their history, almost every people, now
civilized, have consisted, in majority, of slaves. A people in that
condition require to raise them out of it a very different polity from
a nation of savages. If they are energetic by nature, and especially
if there be associated with them in the same community an industrious
class who are neither slaves nor slave-owners (as was the case in
Greece), they need, probably, no more to insure their improvement than
to make them free: when freed, they may often be fit, like Roman
freedmen, to be admitted at once to the full rights of citizenship.
This, however, is not the normal condition of slavery, and is
generally a sign that it is becoming obsolete. A slave, properly so
called, is a being who has not learned to help himself. He is, no
doubt, one step in advance of a savage. He has not the first lesson of
political society still to acquire. He has learned to obey. But what
he obeys is only a direct command. It is the characteristic of _born_
slaves to be incapable of conforming their conduct to a rule or law.
They can only do what they are ordered, and only when they are ordered
to do it. If a man whom they fear is standing over them and
threatening them with punishment, they obey; but when his back is
turned, the work remains undone. The motive determining them must
appeal, not to their interests, but to their instincts; immediate hope
or immediate terror. A despotism, which may tame the savage, will, in
so far as it is a despotism, only confirm the slaves in their
incapacities. Yet a government under their own control would be
entirely unmanageable by them. Their improvement can not come from
themselves, but must be superinduced from without. The step which they
have to take, and their only path to improvement, is to be raised from
a government of will to one of law. They have to be taught
self-government, and this, in its initial stage, means the capacity to
act on general instructions. What they require is not a government of
force, but one of guidance. Being, however, in too low a state to
yield to the guidance of any but those to whom they look up as the
possessors of force, the sort of government fittest for them is one
which possesses force, but seldom uses it; a parental despotism or
aristocracy, resembling the St. Simonian form of Socialism;
maintaining a general superintendence over all the operations of
society, so as to keep before each the sense of a present force
sufficient to compel his obedience to the rule laid down, but which,
owing to the impossibility of descending to regulate all the minutiæ
of industry and life, necessarily leaves and induces individuals to do
much of themselves. This, which may be termed the government of
leading-strings, seems to be the one required to carry such a people
the most rapidly through the next necessary step in social progress.
Such appears to have been the idea of the government of the Incas of
Peru, and such was that of the Jesuits of Paraguay. I need scarcely
remark that leading-strings are only admissible as a means of
gradually training the people to walk alone.

It would be out of place to carry the illustration further. To attempt
to investigate what kind of government is suited to every known state
of society would be to compose a treatise, not on representative
government, but on political science at large. For our more limited
purpose we borrow from political philosophy only its general
principles. To determine the form of government most suited to any
particular people, we must be able, among the defects and shortcomings
which belong to that people, to distinguish those that are the
immediate impediment to progress--to discover what it is which (as it
were) stops the way. The best government for them is the one which
tends most to give them that for want of which they can not advance,
or advance only in a lame and lopsided manner. We must not, however,
forget the reservation necessary in all things which have for their
object improvement or Progress, namely, that in seeking the good which
is needed, no damage, or as little as possible, be done to that
already possessed. A people of savages should be taught obedience, but
not in such a manner as to convert them into a people of slaves. And
(to give the observation a higher generality) the form of government
which is most effectual for carrying a people through the next stage
of progress will still be very improper for them if it does this in
such a manner as to obstruct, or positively unfit them for, the step
next beyond. Such cases are frequent, and are among the most
melancholy facts in history. The Egyptian hierarchy, the paternal
despotism of China, were very fit instruments for carrying those
nations up to the point of civilization which they attained. But
having reached that point, they were brought to a permanent halt for
want of mental liberty and individuality--requisites of improvement
which the institutions that had carried them thus far entirely
incapacitated them from acquiring--and as the institutions did not
break down and give place to others, further improvement stopped. In
contrast with these nations, let us consider the example of an
opposite character afforded by another and a comparatively
insignificant Oriental people--the Jews. They, too, had an absolute
monarchy and a hierarchy, and their organized institutions were as
obviously of sacerdotal origin as those of the Hindoos. These
did for them what was done for other Oriental races by their
institutions--subdued them to industry and order, and gave them a
national life. But neither their kings nor their priests ever
obtained, as in those other countries, the exclusive moulding of their
character. Their religion, which enabled persons of genius and a high
religious tone to be regarded and to regard themselves as inspired
from heaven, gave existence to an inestimably precious unorganized
institution--the Order (if it may be so termed) of Prophets. Under the
protection, generally though not always effectual, of their sacred
character, the Prophets were a power in the nation, often more than a
match for kings and priests, and kept up, in that little corner of the
earth, the antagonism of influences which is the only real security
for continued progress. Religion, consequently, was not there what it
has been in so many other places--a consecration of all that was once
established, and a barrier against further improvement. The remark of
a distinguished Hebrew, M. Salvador, that the Prophets were, in Church
and State, the equivalent of the modern liberty of the press, gives a
just but not an adequate conception of the part fulfilled in national
and universal history by this great element of Jewish life; by means
of which, the canon of inspiration never being complete, the persons
most eminent in genius and moral feeling could not only denounce and
reprobate, with the direct authority of the Almighty, whatever
appeared to them deserving of such treatment, but could give forth
better and higher interpretations of the national religion, which
thenceforth became part of the religion. Accordingly, whoever can
divest himself of the habit of reading the Bible as if it was one
book, which until lately was equally inveterate in Christians and in
unbelievers, sees with admiration the vast interval between the
morality and religion of the Pentateuch, or even of the historical
books (the unmistakable work of Hebrew Conservatives of the sacerdotal
order), and the morality and religion of the prophecies--a distance as
wide as between these last and the Gospels. Conditions more favorable
to Progress could not easily exist; accordingly, the Jews, instead of
being stationary like other Asiatics, were, next to the Greeks, the
most progressive people of antiquity, and, jointly with them, have
been the starting-point and main propelling agency of modern
cultivation.

It is, then, impossible to understand the question of the adaptation
of forms of government to states of society, without taking into
account not only the next step, but all the steps which society has
yet to make; both those which can be foreseen, and the far wider
indefinite range which is at present out of sight. It follows, that to
judge of the merits of forms of government, an ideal must be
constructed of the form of government most eligible in itself, that
is, which, if the necessary conditions existed for giving effect to
its beneficial tendencies, would, more than all others, favor and
promote, not some one improvement, but all forms and degrees of it.
This having been done, we must consider what are the mental conditions
of all sorts necessary to enable this government to realize its
tendencies, and what, therefore, are the various defects by which a
people is made incapable of reaping its benefits. It would then be
possible to construct a theorem of the circumstances in which that
form of government may wisely be introduced; and also to judge, in
cases in which it had better not be introduced, what inferior forms of
polity will best carry those communities through the intermediate
stages which they must traverse before they can become fit for the
best form of government.

Of these inquiries, the last does not concern us here, but the first
is an essential part of our subject; for we may, without rashness, at
once enunciate a proposition, the proofs and illustrations of which
will present themselves in the ensuing pages, that this ideally best
form of government will be found in some one or other variety of the
Representative System.



Chapter III--That the ideally best Form of Government is Representative Government.


It has long (perhaps throughout the entire duration of British
freedom) been a common form of speech, that if a good despot could be
insured, despotic monarchy would be the best form of government. I
look upon this as a radical and most pernicious misconception of what
good government is, which, until it can be got rid of, will fatally
vitiate all our speculations on government.

The supposition is, that absolute power, in the hands of an eminent
individual, would insure a virtuous and intelligent performance of all
the duties of government. Good laws would be established and enforced,
bad laws would be reformed; the best men would be placed in all
situations of trust; justice would be as well administered, the public
burdens would be as light and as judiciously imposed, every branch of
administration would be as purely and as intelligently conducted as
the circumstances of the country and its degree of intellectual and
moral cultivation would admit. I am willing, for the sake of the
argument, to concede all this, but I must point out how great the
concession is, how much more is needed to produce even an
approximation to these results than is conveyed in the simple
expression, a good despot. Their realization would in fact imply, not
merely a good monarch, but an all-seeing one. He must be at all times
informed correctly, in considerable detail, of the conduct and working
of every branch of administration, in every district of the country,
and must be able, in the twenty-four hours per day, which are all that
is granted to a king as to the humblest laborer, to give an effective
share of attention and superintendence to all parts of this vast
field; or he must at least be capable of discerning and choosing out,
from among the mass of his subjects, not only a large abundance of
honest and able men, fit to conduct every branch of public
administration under supervision and control, but also the small
number of men of eminent virtues and talents who can be trusted not
only to do without that supervision, but to exercise it themselves
over others. So extraordinary are the faculties and energies required
for performing this task in any supportable manner, that the good
despot whom we are supposing can hardly be imagined as consenting to
undertake it unless as a refuge from intolerable evils, and a
transitional preparation for something beyond. But the argument can do
without even this immense item in the account. Suppose the difficulty
vanquished. What should we then have? One man of superhuman mental
activity managing the entire affairs of a mentally passive people.
Their passivity is implied in the very idea of absolute power. The
nation as a whole, and every individual composing it, are without any
potential voice in their own destiny. They exercise no will in respect
to their collective interests. All is decided for them by a will not
their own, which it is legally a crime for them to disobey. What sort
of human beings can be formed under such a regimen? What development
can either their thinking or their active faculties attain under it?
On matters of pure theory they might perhaps be allowed to speculate,
so long as their speculations either did not approach politics, or had
not the remotest connection with its practice. On practical affairs
they could at most be only suffered to suggest; and even under the
most moderate of despots, none but persons of already admitted or
reputed superiority could hope that their suggestions would be known
to, much less regarded by, those who had the management of affairs. A
person must have a very unusual taste for intellectual exercise in and
for itself who will put himself to the trouble of thought when it is
to have no outward effect, or qualify himself for functions which he
has no chance of being allowed to exercise. The only sufficient
incitement to mental exertion, in any but a few minds in a generation,
is the prospect of some practical use to be made of its results. It
does not follow that the nation will be wholly destitute of
intellectual power. The common business of life, which must
necessarily be performed by each individual or family for themselves,
will call forth some amount of intelligence and practical ability,
within a certain narrow range of ideas. There may be a select class of
_savants_ who cultivate science with a view to its physical uses or
for the pleasure of the pursuit. There will be a bureaucracy, and
persons in training for the bureaucracy, who will be taught at least
some empirical maxims of government and public administration. There
may be, and often has been, a systematic organization of the best
mental power in the country in some special direction (commonly
military) to promote the grandeur of the despot. But the public at
large remain without information and without interest on all greater
matters of practice; or, if they have any knowledge of them, it is but
a _dilettante_ knowledge, like that which people have of the
mechanical arts who have never handled a tool. Nor is it only in their
intelligence that they suffer. Their moral capacities are equally
stunted. Wherever the sphere of action of human beings is artificially
circumscribed, their sentiments are narrowed and dwarfed in the same
proportion. The food of feeling is action; even domestic affection
lives upon voluntary good offices. Let a person have nothing to do for
his country, and he will not care for it. It has been said of old that
in a despotism there is at most but one patriot, the despot himself;
and the saying rests on a just appreciation of the effects of absolute
subjection even to a good and wise master. Religion remains; and here,
at least, it may be thought, is an agency that may be relied on for
lifting men's eyes and minds above the dust at their feet. But
religion, even supposing it to escape perversion for the purposes of
despotism, ceases in these circumstances to be a social concern, and
narrows into a personal affair between an individual and his Maker, in
which the issue at stake is but his private salvation. Religion in
this shape is quite consistent with the most selfish and contracted
egoism, and identifies the votary as little in feeling with the rest
of his kind as sensuality itself.

A good despotism means a government in which, so far as depends on the
despot, there is no positive oppression by officers of state, but in
which all the collective interests of the people are managed for them,
all the thinking that has relation to collective interests done for
them, and in which their minds are formed by, and consenting to, this
abdication of their own energies. Leaving things to the government,
like leaving them to Providence, is synonymous with caring nothing
about them, and accepting their results, when disagreeable, as
visitations of Nature. With the exception, therefore, of a few
studious men who take an intellectual interest in speculation for its
own sake, the intelligence and sentiments of the whole people are
given up to the material interests, and when these are provided for,
to the amusement and ornamentation of private life. But to say this is
to say, if the whole testimony of history is worth any thing, that the
era of national decline has arrived; that is, if the nation had ever
attained any thing to decline from. If it has never risen above the
condition of an Oriental people, in that condition it continues to
stagnate; but if, like Greece or Rome, it had realized any thing
higher, through the energy, patriotism, and enlargement of mind,
which, as national qualities, are the fruits solely of freedom, it
relapses in a few generations into the Oriental state. And that state
does not mean stupid tranquillity, with security against change for
the worse; it often means being overrun, conquered, and reduced to
domestic slavery either by a stronger despot, or by the nearest
barbarous people who retain along with their savage rudeness the
energies of freedom.

Such are not merely the natural tendencies, but the inherent
necessities of despotic government; from which there is no outlet,
unless in so far as the despotism consents not to be despotism; in so
far as the supposed good despot abstains from exercising his power,
and, though holding it in reserve, allows the general business of
government to go on as if the people really governed themselves.
However little probable it may be, we may imagine a despot observing
many of the rules and restraints of constitutional government. He
might allow such freedom of the press and of discussion as would
enable a public opinion to form and express itself on national
affairs. He might suffer local interests to be managed, without the
interference of authority, by the people themselves. He might even
surround himself with a council or councils of government, freely
chosen by the whole or some portion of the nation, retaining in his
own hands the power of taxation, and the supreme legislative as well
as executive authority. Were he to act thus, and so far abdicate as a
despot, he would do away with a considerable part of the evils
characteristic of despotism. Political activity and capacity for
public affairs would no longer be prevented from growing up in the
body of the nation, and a public opinion would form itself, not the
mere echo of the government. But such improvement would be the
beginning of new difficulties. This public opinion, independent of the
monarch's dictation, must be either with him or against him; if not
the one, it will be the other. All governments must displease many
persons, and these having now regular organs, and being able to
express their sentiments, opinions adverse to the measures of
government would often be expressed. What is the monarch to do when
these unfavorable opinions happen to be in the majority? Is he to
alter his course? Is he to defer to the nation? If so, he is no longer
a despot, but a constitutional king; an organ or first minister of the
people, distinguished only by being irremovable. If not, he must
either put down opposition by his despotic power, or there will arise
a permanent antagonism between the people and one man, which can have
but one possible ending. Not even a religious principle of passive
obedience and "right divine" would long ward off the natural
consequences of such a position. The monarch would have to succumb,
and conform to the conditions of constitutional royalty, or give place
to some one who would. The despotism, being thus chiefly nominal,
would possess few of the advantages supposed to belong to absolute
monarchy, while it would realize in a very imperfect degree those of a
free government, since, however great an amount of liberty the
citizens might practically enjoy, they could never forget that they
held it on sufferance, and by a concession which, under the existing
constitution of the state might at any moment be resumed; that they
were legally slaves, though of a prudent or indulgent master.

It is not much to be wondered at if impatient or disappointed
reformers, groaning under the impediments opposed to the most salutary
public improvements by the ignorance, the indifference, the
untractableness, the perverse obstinacy of a people, and the corrupt
combinations of selfish private interests, armed with the powerful
weapons afforded by free institutions, should at times sigh for a
strong hand to bear down all these obstacles, and compel a
recalcitrant people to be better governed. But (setting aside the fact
that for one despot who now and then reforms an abuse, there are
ninety-nine who do nothing but create them) those who look in any such
direction for the realization of their hopes leave out of the idea of
good government its principal element, the improvement of the people
themselves. One of the benefits of freedom is that under it the ruler
can not pass by the people's minds, and amend their affairs for them
without amending _them_. If it were possible for the people to be well
governed in spite of themselves, their good government would last no
longer than the freedom of a people usually lasts who have been
liberated by foreign arms without their own co-operation. It is true,
a despot may educate the people, and to do so really would be the best
apology for his despotism. But any education which aims at making
human beings other than machines, in the long run makes them claim to
have the control of their own actions. The leaders of French
philosophy in the eighteenth century had been educated by the Jesuits.
Even Jesuit education, it seems, was sufficiently real to call forth
the appetite for freedom. Whatever invigorates the faculties, in
however small a measure, creates an increased desire for their more
unimpeded exercise; and a popular education is a failure if it
educates the people for any state but that which it will certainly
induce them to desire, and most probably to demand.

I am far from condemning, in cases of extreme exigency, the assumption
of absolute power in the form of a temporary dictatorship. Free
nations have, in times of old, conferred such power by their own
choice, as a necessary medicine for diseases of the body politic which
could not be got rid of by less violent means. But its acceptance,
even for a time strictly limited, can only be excused, if, like Solon
or Pittacus, the dictator employs the whole power he assumes in
removing the obstacles which debar the nation from the enjoyment of
freedom. A good despotism is an altogether false ideal, which
practically (except as a means to some temporary purpose) becomes the
most senseless and dangerous of chimeras. Evil for evil, a good
despotism, in a country at all advanced in civilization, is more
noxious than a bad one, for it is far more relaxing and enervating to
the thoughts, feelings, and energies of the people. The despotism of
Augustus prepared the Romans for Tiberius. If the whole tone of their
character had not first been prostrated by nearly two generations of
that mild slavery, they would probably have had spirit enough left to
rebel against the more odious one.

There is no difficulty in showing that the ideally best form of
government is that in which the sovereignty, or supreme controlling
power in the last resort, is vested in the entire aggregate of the
community, every citizen not only having a voice in the exercise of
that ultimate sovereignty, but being, at least occasionally, called on
to take an actual part in the government by the personal discharge of
some public function, local or general.

To test this proposition, it has to be examined in reference to the
two branches into which, as pointed out in the last chapter, the
inquiry into the goodness of a government conveniently divides itself,
namely, how far it promotes the good management of the affairs of
society by means of the existing faculties, moral, intellectual, and
active, of its various members, and what is its effect in improving or
deteriorating those faculties.

The ideally best form of government, it is scarcely necessary to say,
does not mean one which is practicable or eligible in all states of
civilization, but the one which, in the circumstances in which it is
practicable and eligible, is attended with the greatest amount of
beneficial consequences, immediate and prospective. A completely
popular government is the only polity which can make out any claim to
this character. It is pre-eminent in both the departments between
which the excellence of a political Constitution is divided. It is
both more favorable to present good government, and promotes a better
and higher form of national character than any other polity
whatsoever.

Its superiority in reference to present well-being rests upon two
principles, of as universal truth and applicability as any general
propositions which can be laid down respecting human affairs. The
first is, that the rights and interests of every or any person are
only secure from being disregarded when the person interested is
himself able, and habitually disposed to stand up for them. The second
is, that the general prosperity attains a greater height, and is more
widely diffused, in proportion to the amount and variety of the
personal energies enlisted in promoting it.

Putting these two propositions into a shape more special to their
present application--human beings are only secure from evil at the
hands of others in proportion as they have the power of being, and
are, self-_protecting_; and they only achieve a high degree of success
in their struggle with Nature in proportion as they are
self-_dependent_, relying on what they themselves can do, either
separately or in concert, rather than on what others do for them.

The former proposition--that each is the only safe guardian of his own
rights and interests--is one of those elementary maxims of prudence
which every person capable of conducting his own affairs implicitly
acts upon wherever he himself is interested. Many, indeed, have a
great dislike to it as a political doctrine, and are fond of holding
it up to obloquy as a doctrine of universal selfishness. To which we
may answer, that whenever it ceases to be true that mankind, as a
rule, prefer themselves to others, and those nearest to them to those
more remote, from that moment Communism is not only practicable, but
the only defensible form of society, and will, when that time arrives,
be assuredly carried into effect. For my own part, not believing in
universal selfishness, I have no difficulty in admitting that
Communism would even now be practicable among the _élite_ of mankind,
and may become so among the rest. But as this opinion is any thing but
popular with those defenders of existing institutions who find fault
with the doctrine of the general predominance of self-interest, I am
inclined to think they do in reality believe that most men consider
themselves before other people. It is not, however, necessary to
affirm even thus much in order to support the claim of all to
participate in the sovereign power. We need not suppose that when
power resides in an exclusive class, that class will knowingly and
deliberately sacrifice the other classes to themselves: it suffices
that, in the absence of its natural defenders, the interest of the
excluded is always in danger of being overlooked; and, when looked at,
is seen with very different eyes from those of the persons whom it
directly concerns. In this country, for example, what are called the
working-classes may be considered as excluded from all direct
participation in the government. I do not believe that the classes who
do participate in it have in general any intention of sacrificing the
working classes to themselves. They once had that intention; witness
the persevering attempts so long made to keep down wages by law. But
in the present day, their ordinary disposition is the very opposite:
they willingly make considerable sacrifices, especially of their
pecuniary interest, for the benefit of the working classes, and err
rather by too lavish and indiscriminating beneficence; nor do I
believe that any rulers in history have been actuated by a more
sincere desire to do their duty towards the poorer portion of their
countrymen. Yet does Parliament, or almost any of the members
composing it, ever for an instant look at any question with the eyes
of a working man? When a subject arises in which the laborers as such
have an interest, is it regarded from any point of view but that of
the employers of labor? I do not say that the working men's view of
these questions is in general nearer to the truth than the other, but
it is sometimes quite as near; and in any case it ought to be
respectfully listened to, instead of being, as it is, not merely
turned away from, but ignored. On the question of strikes, for
instance, it is doubtful if there is so much as one among the leading
members of either House who is not firmly convinced that the reason of
the matter is unqualifiedly on the side of the masters, and that the
men's view of it is simply absurd. Those who have studied the question
know well how far this is from being the case, and in how different,
and how infinitely less superficial a manner the point would have to
be argued, if the classes who strike were able to make themselves
heard in Parliament.

It is an adherent condition of human affairs that no intention,
however sincere, of protecting the interests of others can make it
safe or salutary to tie up their own hands. Still more obviously true
is it that by their own hands only can any positive and durable
improvement of their circumstances in life be worked out. Through the
joint influence of these two principles, all free communities have
both been more exempt from social injustice and crime, and have
attained more brilliant prosperity than any others, or than they
themselves after they lost their freedom. Contrast the free states of
the world, while their freedom lasted, with the cotemporary subjects
of monarchical or oligarchical despotism: the Greek cities with the
Persian satrapies; the Italian republics and the free towns of
Flanders and Germany, with the feudal monarchies of Europe;
Switzerland, Holland, and England, with Austria or ante-revolutionary
France. Their superior prosperity was too obvious ever to have been
gainsayed; while their superiority in good government and social
relations is proved by the prosperity, and is manifest besides in
every page of history. If we compare, not one age with another, but
the different governments which coexisted in the same age, no amount
of disorder which exaggeration itself can pretend to have existed
amidst the publicity of the free states can be compared for a moment
with the contemptuous trampling upon the mass of the people which
pervaded the whole life of the monarchical countries, or the
disgusting individual tyranny which was of more than daily occurrence
under the systems of plunder which they called fiscal arrangements,
and in the secrecy of their frightful courts of justice.

It must be acknowledged that the benefits of freedom, so far as they
have hitherto been enjoyed, were obtained by the extension of its
privileges to a part only of the community; and that a government in
which they are extended impartially to all is a desideratum still
unrealized. But, though every approach to this has an independent
value, and in many cases more than an approach could not, in the
existing state of general improvement, be made, the participation of
all in these benefits is the ideally perfect conception of free
government. In proportion as any, no matter who, are excluded from it,
the interests of the excluded are left without the guaranty accorded
to the rest, and they themselves have less scope and encouragement
than they might otherwise have to that exertion of their energies for
the good of themselves and of the community, to which the general
prosperity is always proportioned.

Thus stands the case as regards present well-being--the good
management of the affairs of the existing generation. If we now pass
to the influence of the form of government upon character, we shall
find the superiority of popular government over every other to be, if
possible, still more decided and indisputable.

This question really depends upon a still more fundamental one, viz.,
which of two common types of character, for the general good of
humanity, it is most desirable should predominate--the active or the
passive type; that which struggles against evils, or that which
endures them; that which bends to circumstances, or that which
endeavours to make circumstances bend to itself.

The commonplaces of moralists and the general sympathies of mankind
are in favor of the passive type. Energetic characters may be admired,
but the acquiescent and submissive are those which most men personally
prefer. The passiveness of our neighbors increases our sense of
security, and plays into the hands of our wilfulness. Passive
characters, if we do not happen to need their activity, seem an
obstruction the less in our own path. A contented character is not a
dangerous rival. Yet nothing is more certain than that improvement in
human affairs is wholly the work of the uncontented characters; and,
moreover, that it is much easier for an active mind to acquire the
virtues of patience, than for a passive one to assume those of energy.

Of the three varieties of mental excellence, intellectual, practical,
and moral, there never could be any doubt in regard to the first two,
which side had the advantage. All intellectual superiority is the
fruit of active effort. Enterprise, the desire to keep moving, to be
trying and accomplishing new things for our own benefit or that of
others, is the parent even of speculative, and much more of practical,
talent. The intellectual culture compatible with the other type is of
that feeble and vague description which belongs to a mind that stops
at amusement or at simple contemplation. The test of real and vigorous
thinking, the thinking which ascertains truths instead of dreaming
dreams, is successful application to practice. Where that purpose does
not exist, to give definiteness, precision, and an intelligible
meaning to thought, it generates nothing better than the mystical
metaphysics of the Pythagoreans or the Veds. With respect to practical
improvement, the case is still more evident. The character which
improves human life is that which struggles with natural powers and
tendencies, not that which gives way to them. The self-benefiting
qualities are all on the side of the active and energetic character,
and the habits and conduct which promote the advantage of each
individual member of the community must be at least a part of those
which conduce most in the end to the advancement of the community as a
whole.

But on the point of moral preferability, there seems at first sight to
be room for doubt. I am not referring to the religious feeling which
has so generally existed in favor of the inactive character, as being
more in harmony with the submission due to the divine will.
Christianity, as well as other religions, has fostered this sentiment;
but it is the prerogative of Christianity, as regards this and many
other perversions, that it is able to throw them off. Abstractedly
from religious considerations, a passive character, which yields to
obstacles instead of striving to overcome them, may not indeed be very
useful to others, no more than to itself, but it might be expected to
be at least inoffensive. Contentment is always counted among the moral
virtues. But it is a complete error to suppose that contentment is
necessarily or naturally attendant on passivity of character; and
useless it is, the moral consequences are mischievous. Where there
exists a desire for advantages not possessed, the mind which does not
potentially possess them by means of its own energies is apt to look
with hatred and malice on those who do. The person bestirring himself
with hopeful prospects to improve his circumstances is the one who
feels good-will towards others engaged in, or who have succeeded in
the same pursuit. And where the majority are so engaged, those who do
not attain the object have had the tone given to their feelings by the
general habit of the country, and ascribe their failure to want of
effort or opportunity, or to their personal ill luck. But those who,
while desiring what others possess, put no energy into striving for
it, are either incessantly grumbling that fortune does not do for them
what they do not attempt to do for themselves, or overflowing with
envy and ill-will towards those who possess what they would like to
have.

In proportion as success in life is seen or believed to be the fruit
of fatality or accident and not of exertion in that same ratio does
envy develop itself as a point of national character. The most envious
of all mankind are the Orientals. In Oriental moralists, in Oriental
tales, the envious man is remarkably prominent. In real life, he is
the terror of all who possess any thing desirable, be it a palace, a
handsome child, or even good health and spirits: the supposed effect
of his mere look constitutes the all-pervading superstition of the
evil eye. Next to Orientals in envy, as in activity, are some of the
Southern Europeans. The Spaniards pursued all their great men with it,
embittered their lives, and generally succeeded in putting an early
stop to their successes. [1] With the French, who are essentially
a Southern people, the double education of despotism and Catholicism
has, in spite of their impulsive temperament, made submission and
endurance the common character of the people, and their most received
notion of wisdom and excellence; and if envy of one another, and of
all superiority, is not more rife among them than it is, the
circumstance must be ascribed to the many valuable counteracting
elements in the French character, and most of all to the great
individual energy which, though less persistent and more intermittent
than in the self-helping and struggling Anglo-Saxons, has nevertheless
manifested itself among the French in nearly every direction in which
the operation of their institutions has been favorable to it.

There are, no doubt, in all countries, really contented characters,
who not merely do not seek, but do not desire, what they do not
already possess, and these naturally bear no ill-will towards such as
have apparently a more favored lot. But the great mass of seeming
contentment is real discontent, combined with indolence or
self-indulgence, which, while taking no legitimate means of raising
itself, delights in bringing others down to its own level. And if we
look narrowly even at the cases of innocent contentment, we perceive
that they only win our admiration when the indifference is solely to
improvement in outward circumstances, and there is a striving for
perpetual advancement in spiritual worth, or at least a disinterested
zeal to benefit others. The contented man, or the contented family,
who have no ambition to make any one else happier, to promote the good
of their country or their neighborhood, or to improve themselves in
moral excellence, excite in us neither admiration nor approval. We
rightly ascribe this sort of contentment to mere unmanliness and want
of spirit. The content which we approve is an ability to do cheerfully
without what can not be had, a just appreciation of the comparative
value of different objects of desire, and a willing renunciation of
the less when incompatible with the greater. These, however, are
excellences more natural to the character, in proportion as it is
actively engaged in the attempt to improve its own or some other lot.
He who is continually measuring his energy against difficulties,
learns what are the difficulties insuperable to him, and what are
those which, though he might overcome, the success is not worth the
cost. He whose thoughts and activities are all needed for, and
habitually employed in, practicable and useful enterprises, is the
person of all others least likely to let his mind dwell with brooding
discontent upon things either not worth attaining, or which are not so
to him. Thus the active, self-helping character is not only
intrinsically the best, but is the likeliest to acquire all that is
really excellent or desirable in the opposite type.

The striving, go-ahead character of England and the United States is
only a fit subject of disapproving criticism on account of the very
secondary objects on which it commonly expends its strength. In itself
it is the foundation of the best hopes for the general improvement of
mankind. It has been acutely remarked that whenever any thing goes
amiss, the habitual impulse of French people is to say, "Il faut de la
patience;" and of English people, "What a shame!" The people who think
it a shame when any thing goes wrong--who rush to the conclusion that
the evil could and ought to have been prevented, are those who, in the
long run, do most to make the world better. If the desires are low
placed, if they extend to little beyond physical comfort, and the show
of riches, the immediate results of the energy will not be much more
than the continual extension of man's power over material objects; but
even this makes room, and prepares the mechanical appliances for the
greatest intellectual and social achievements; and while the energy is
there, some persons will apply it, and it will be applied more and
more, to the perfecting, not of outward circumstances alone, but of
man's inward nature. Inactivity, unaspiringness, absence of desire,
are a more fatal hindrance to improvement than any misdirection of
energy, and is that through which alone, when existing in the mass,
any very formidable misdirection by an energetic few becomes possible.
It is this, mainly, which retains in a savage or semi-savage state the
great majority of the human race.

Now there can be no kind of doubt that the passive type of character
is favored by the government of one or a few, and the active
self-helping type by that of the many. Irresponsible rulers need the
quiescence of the ruled more than they need any activity but that
which they can compel. Submissiveness to the prescriptions of men as
necessities of nature is the lesson inculcated by all governments upon
those who are wholly without participation in them. The will of
superiors, and the law as the will of superiors, must be passively
yielded to. But no men are mere instruments or materials in the hands
of their rulers who have will, or spirit, or a spring of internal
activity in the rest of their proceedings, and any manifestation of
these qualities, instead of receiving encouragement from despots, has
to get itself forgiven by them. Even when irresponsible rulers are not
sufficiently conscious of danger from the mental activity of their
subjects to be desirous of repressing it, the position itself is a
repression. Endeavour is even more effectually restrained by the
certainty of its impotence than by any positive discouragement.
Between subjection to the will of others and the virtues of self-help
and self-government there is a natural incompatibility. This is more
or less complete according as the bondage is strained or relaxed.
Rulers differ very much in the length to which they carry the control
of the free agency of their subjects, or the supersession of it by
managing their business for them. But the difference is in degree, not
in principle; and the best despots often go the greatest lengths in
chaining up the free agency of their subjects. A bad despot, when his
own personal indulgences have been provided for, may sometimes be
willing to let the people alone; but a good despot insists on doing
them good by making them do their own business in a better way than
they themselves know of. The regulations which restricted to fixed
processes all the leading branches of French manufactures were the
work of the great Colbert.

Very different is the state of the human faculties where a human being
feels himself under no other external restraint than the necessities
of nature, or mandates of society which he has his share in imposing,
and which it is open to him, if he thinks them wrong, publicly to
dissent from, and exert himself actively to get altered. No doubt,
under a government partially popular, this freedom may be exercised
even by those who are not partakers in the full privileges of
citizenship; but it is a great additional stimulus to any one's
self-help and self-reliance when he starts from even ground, and has
not to feel that his success depends on the impression he can make
upon the sentiments and dispositions of a body of whom he is not one.
It is a great discouragement to an individual, and a still greater one
to a class, to be left out of the constitution; to be reduced to plead
from outside the door to the arbiters of their destiny, not taken into
consultation within. The maximum of the invigorating effect of freedom
upon the character is only obtained when the person acted on either
is, or is looking forward to becoming, a citizen as fully privileged
as any other. What is still more important than even this matter of
feeling is the practical discipline which the character obtains from
the occasional demand made upon the citizens to exercise, for a time
and in their turn, some social function. It is not sufficiently
considered how little there is in most men's ordinary life to give any
largeness either to their conceptions or to their sentiments. Their
work is a routine; not a labor of love, but of self-interest in the
most elementary form, the satisfaction of daily wants; neither the
thing done, nor the process of doing it, introduces the mind to
thoughts or feelings extending beyond individuals; if instructive
books are within their reach, there is no stimulus to read them; and,
in most cases, the individual has no access to any person of
cultivation much superior to his own. Giving him something to do for
the public supplies, in a measure, all these deficiencies. If
circumstances allow the amount of public duty assigned him to be
considerable, it makes him an educated man. Notwithstanding the
defects of the social system and moral ideas of antiquity, the
practice of the dicastery and the ecclesia raised the intellectual
standard of an average Athenian citizen far beyond any thing of which
there is yet an example in any other mass of men, ancient or modern.
The proofs of this are apparent in every page of our great historian
of Greece; but we need scarcely look further than to the high quality
of the addresses which their great orators deemed best calculated to
act with effect on their understanding and will. A benefit of the same
kind, though far less in degree, is produced on Englishmen of the
lower middle class by their liability to be placed on juries and to
serve parish offices, which, though it does not occur to so many, nor
is so continuous, nor introduces them to so great a variety of
elevated considerations as to admit of comparison with the public
education which every citizen of Athens obtained from her democratic
institutions, makes them nevertheless very different beings, in range
of ideas and development of faculties, from those who have done
nothing in their lives but drive a quill, or sell goods over a
counter. Still more salutary is the moral part of the instruction
afforded by the participation of the private citizen, if even rarely,
in public functions. He is called upon, while so engaged, to weigh
interests not his own; to be guided, in case of conflicting claims, by
another rule than his private partialities; to apply, at every turn,
principles and maxims which have for their reason of existence the
general good; and he usually finds associated with him in the same
work minds more familiarized than his own with these ideas and
operations, whose study it will be to supply reasons to his
understanding, and stimulation to his feeling for the general
interest. He is made to feel himself one of the public, and whatever
is their interest to be his interest. Where this school of public
spirit does not exist, scarcely any sense is entertained that private
persons, in no eminent social situation, owe any duties to society
except to obey the laws and submit to the government. There is no
unselfish sentiment of identification with the public. Every thought
or feeling, either of interest or of duty, is absorbed in the
individual and in the family. The man never thinks of any collective
interest, of any objects to be pursued jointly with others, but only
in competition with them, and in some measure at their expense. A
neighbor, not being an ally or an associate, since he is never engaged
in any common undertaking for joint benefit, is therefore only a
rival. Thus even private morality suffers, while public is actually
extinct. Were this the universal and only possible state of things,
the utmost aspirations of the lawgiver or the moralist could only
stretch to make the bulk of the community a flock of sheep innocently
nibbling the grass side by side.

From these accumulated considerations, it is evident that the only
government which can fully satisfy all the exigencies of the social
state is one in which the whole people participate; that any
participation, even in the smallest public function, is useful; that
the participation should every where be as great as the general degree
of improvement of the community will allow; and that nothing less can
be ultimately desirable than the admission of all to a share in the
sovereign power of the state. But since all can not, in a community
exceeding a single small town, participate personally in any but some
very minor portions of the public business, it follows that the ideal
type of a perfect government must be representative.



Chapter IV--Under what Social Conditions Representative Government is Inapplicable.


We have recognized in representative government the ideal type of the
most perfect polity for which, in consequence, any portion of mankind
are better adapted in proportion to their degree of general
improvement. As they range lower and lower in development, that form
of government will be, generally speaking, less suitable to them,
though this is not true universally; for the adaptation of a people to
representative government does not depend so much upon the place they
occupy in the general scale of humanity as upon the degree in which
they possess certain special requisites; requisites, however, so
closely connected with their degree of general advancement, that any
variation between the two is rather the exception than the rule. Let
us examine at what point in the descending series representative
government ceases altogether to be admissible, either through its own
unfitness or the superior fitness of some other regimen.

First, then, representative, like any other government, must
be unsuitable in any case in which it can not permanently
subsist--_i.e._, in which it does not fulfill the three fundamental
conditions enumerated in the first chapter. These were, 1. That the
people should be willing to receive it. 2. That they should be willing
and able to do what is necessary for its preservation. 3. That they
should be willing and able to fulfill the duties and discharge the
functions which it imposes on them.

The willingness of the people to accept representative government only
becomes a practical question when an enlightened ruler, or a foreign
nation or nations who have gained power over the country, are disposed
to offer it the boon. To individual reformers the question is almost
irrelevant, since, if no other objection can be made to their
enterprise than that the opinion of the nation is not yet on their
side, they have the ready and proper answer, that to bring it over to
their side is the very end they aim at. When opinion is really
adverse, its hostility is usually to the fact of change rather than to
representative government in itself. The contrary case is not indeed
unexampled; there has sometimes been a religious repugnance to any
limitation of the power of a particular line of rulers; but, in
general, the doctrine of passive obedience meant only submission to
the will of the powers that be, whether monarchical or popular. In any
case in which the attempt to introduce representative government is at
all likely to be made, indifference to it, and inability to understand
its processes and requirements, rather than positive opposition, are
the obstacles to be expected. These, however, are as fatal, and may be
as hard to be got rid of as actual aversion; it being easier, in most
cases, to change the direction of an active feeling than to create one
in a state previously passive. When a people have no sufficient value
for, and attachment to, a representative constitution, they have next
to no chance of retaining it. In every country, the executive is the
branch of the government which wields the immediate power, and is in
direct contact with the public; to it, principally, the hopes and
fears of individuals are directed, and by it both the benefits, and
the terrors, and _prestige_ of government are mainly represented to
the public eye. Unless, therefore, the authorities whose office it is
to check the executive are backed by an effective opinion and feeling
in the country, the executive has always the means of setting them
aside or compelling them to subservience, and is sure to be well
supported in doing so. Representative institutions necessarily depend
for permanence upon the readiness of the people to fight for them in
case of their being endangered. If too little valued for this, they
seldom obtain a footing at all, and if they do, are almost sure to be
overthrown as soon as the head of the government, or any party leader
who can muster force for a _coup de main_, is willing to run some
small risk for absolute power.

These considerations relate to the first two causes of failure in a
representative government. The third is when the people want either
the will or the capacity to fulfill the part which belongs to them in
a representative constitution. When nobody, or only some small
fraction, feels the degree of interest in the general affairs of the
state necessary to the formation of a public opinion, the electors
will seldom make any use of the right of suffrage but to serve their
private interest, or the interest of their locality, or of some one
with whom they are connected as adherents or dependents. The small
class who, in this state of public feeling, gain the command of the
representative body, for the most part use it solely as a means of
seeking their fortune. If the executive is weak, the country is
distracted by mere struggles for place; if strong, it makes itself
despotic, at the cheap price of appeasing the representatives, or such
of them as are capable of giving trouble, by a share of the spoil; and
the only fruit produced by national representation is, that in
addition to those who really govern, there is an assembly quartered on
the public, and no abuse in which a portion of the assembly are
interested is at all likely to be removed. When, however, the evil
stops here, the price may be worth paying for the publicity and
discussion which, though not an invariable, are a natural
accompaniment of any, even nominal, representation. In the modern
kingdom of Greece, for example, it can hardly be doubted, that the
place-hunters who chiefly compose the representative assembly, though
they contribute little or nothing directly to good government, nor
even much temper the arbitrary power of the executive, yet keep up the
idea of popular rights, and conduce greatly to the real liberty of the
press which exists in that country. This benefit, however, is entirely
dependent on the coexistence with the popular body of an hereditary
king. If, instead of struggling for the favors of the chief ruler,
these selfish and sordid factions struggled for the chief place
itself, they would certainly, as in Spanish America, keep the country
in a state of chronic revolution and civil war. A despotism, not even
legal, but of illegal violence, would be alternately exercised by a
succession of political adventurers, and the name and forms of
representation would have no effect but to prevent despotism from
attaining the stability and security by which alone its evils can be
mitigated or its few advantages realized.

The preceding are the cases in which representative government can not
permanently exist. There are others in which it possibly might exist,
but in which some other form of government would be preferable. These
are principally when the people, in order to advance in civilization,
have some lesson to learn, some habit not yet acquired, to the
acquisition of which representative government is likely to be an
impediment.

The most obvious of these cases is the one already considered, in
which the people have still to learn the first lesson of civilization,
that of obedience. A race who have been trained in energy and courage
by struggles with Nature and their neighbors, but who have not yet
settled down into permanent obedience to any common superior, would be
little likely to acquire this habit under the collective government of
their own body. A representative assembly drawn from among themselves
would simply reflect their own turbulent insubordination. It would
refuse its authority to all proceedings which would impose, on their
savage independence, any improving restraint. The mode in which such
tribes are usually brought to submit to the primary conditions of
civilized society is through the necessities of warfare, and the
despotic authority indispensable to military command. A military
leader is the only superior to whom they will submit, except
occasionally some prophet supposed to be inspired from above, or
conjurer regarded as possessing miraculous power. These may exercise a
temporary ascendancy, but as it is merely personal, it rarely effects
any change in the general habits of the people, unless the prophet,
like Mohammed, is also a military chief, and goes forth the armed
apostle of a new religion; or unless the military chiefs ally
themselves with his influence, and turn it into a prop for their own
government.

A people are no less unfitted for representative government by the
contrary fault to that last specified--by extreme passiveness, and
ready submission to tyranny. If a people thus prostrated by character
and circumstances could obtain representative institutions, they would
inevitably choose their tyrants as their representatives, and the yoke
would be made heavier on them by the contrivance which _primâ facie_
might be expected to lighten it. On the contrary, many a people has
gradually emerged from this condition by the aid of a central
authority, whose position has made it the rival, and has ended by
making it the master, of the local despots, and which, above all, has
been single. French history, from Hugh Capet to Richelieu and Louis
XIV., is a continued example of this course of things. Even when the
king was scarcely so powerful as many of his chief feudatories, the
great advantage which he derived from being but one has been
recognized by French historians. To him the eyes of _all_ the locally
oppressed were turned; he was the object of hope and reliance
throughout the kingdom, while each local potentate was only powerful
within a more or less confined space. At his hands, refuge and
protection were sought from every part of the country against first
one, then another of the immediate oppressors. His progress to
ascendancy was slow; but it resulted from successively taking
advantage of opportunities which offered themselves only to him. It
was, therefore, sure; and, in proportion as it was accomplished, it
abated, in the oppressed portion of the community, the habit of
submitting to oppression. The king's interest lay in encouraging all
partial attempts on the part of the serfs to emancipate themselves
from their masters, and place themselves in immediate subordination to
himself. Under his protection numerous communities were formed which
knew no one above them but the king. Obedience to a distant monarch is
liberty itself compared with the dominion of the lord of the
neighboring castle; and the monarch was long compelled by necessities
of position to exert his authority as the ally rather than the master
of the classes whom he had aided in affecting their liberation. In
this manner a central power, despotic in principle, though generally
much restricted in practice, was mainly instrumental in carrying the
people through a necessary stage of improvement, which representative
government, if real, would most likely have prevented them from
entering upon. There are parts of Europe where the same work is still
to be done, and no prospect of its being done by any other means.
Nothing short of despotic rule or a general massacre could effect the
emancipation of the serfs in the Russian Empire.

The same passages of history forcibly illustrate another mode in which
unlimited monarchy overcomes obstacles to the progress of civilization
which representative government would have had a decided tendency to
aggravate. One of the strongest hindrances to improvement, up to a
rather advanced stage, is an inveterate spirit of locality. Portions
of mankind, in many other respects capable of, and prepared for
freedom, may be unqualified for amalgamating into even the smallest
nation. Not only may jealousies and antipathies repel them from one
another, and bar all possibility of voluntary union, but they may not
yet have acquired any of the feelings or habits which would make the
union real, supposing it to be nominally accomplished. They may, like
the citizens of an ancient community, or those of an Asiatic village,
have had considerable practice in exercising their faculties on
village or town interests, and have even realized a tolerably
effective popular government on that restricted scale, and may yet
have but slender sympathies with any thing beyond, and no habit or
capacity of dealing with interests common to many such communities. I
am not aware that history furnishes any example in which a number of
these political atoms or corpuscles have coalesced into a body, and
learned to feel themselves one people, except through previous
subjection to a central authority common to all. [2] It is through
the habit of deferring to that authority, entering into its plans and
subserving its purposes, that a people such as we have supposed
receive into their minds the conception of large interests common to a
considerable geographical extent. Such interests, on the contrary, are
necessarily the predominant consideration in the mind of the central
ruler; and through the relations, more or less intimate, which he
progressively establishes with the localities, they become familiar to
the general mind. The most favorable concurrence of circumstances
under which this step in improvement could be made would be one which
should raise up representative institutions without representative
government; a representative body or bodies, drawn from the
localities, making itself the auxiliary and instrument of the central
power, but seldom attempting to thwart or control it. The people being
thus taken, as it were, into council, though not sharing the supreme
power, the political education given by the central authority is
carried home, much more effectually than it could otherwise be, to the
local chiefs and to the population generally, while, at the same time,
a tradition is kept up of government by general consent, or at least,
the sanction of tradition is not given to government without it,
which, when consecrated by custom, has so often put a bad end to a
good beginning, and is one of the most frequent causes of the sad
fatality which in most countries has stopped improvement in so early a
stage, because the work of some one period has been so done as to bar
the needful work of the ages following. Meanwhile, it may be laid down
as a political truth, that by irresponsible monarchy rather than by
representative government can a multitude of insignificant political
units be welded into a people, with common feelings of cohesion, power
enough to protect itself against conquest or foreign aggression, and
affairs sufficiently various and considerable of its own to occupy
worthily and expand to fit proportions the social and political
intelligence of the population.

For these several reasons, kingly government, free from the control
(though perhaps strengthened by the support) of representative
institutions, is the most suitable form of polity for the earliest
stages of any community, not excepting a city community like those of
ancient Greece; where, accordingly, the government of kings, under
some real, but no ostensible or constitutional control by public
opinion, did historically precede by an unknown and probably great
duration all free institutions, and gave place at last, during a
considerable lapse of time, to oligarchies of a few families.

A hundred other infirmities or shortcomings in a people might be
pointed out which _pro tanto_ disqualify them from making the best use
of representative government; but in regard to these it is not equally
obvious that the government of One or a Few would have any tendency to
cure or alleviate the evil. Strong prejudices of any kind; obstinate
adherence to old habits; positive defects of national character, or
mere ignorance, and deficiency of mental cultivation, if prevalent in
a people, will be in general faithfully reflected in their
representative assemblies; and should it happen that the executive
administration, the direct management of public affairs, is in the
hands of persons comparatively free from these defects, more good
would frequently be done by them when not hampered by the necessity of
carrying with them the voluntary assent of such bodies. But the mere
position of the rulers does not in these, as it does in the other
cases which we have examined, of itself invest them with interests and
tendencies operating in the beneficial direction. From the general
weaknesses of the people or of the state of civilization, the One and
his councillors, or the Few, are not likely to be habitually exempt;
except in the case of their being foreigners, belonging to a superior
people or a more advanced state of society. Then, indeed, the rulers
may be, to almost any extent, superior in civilization to those over
whom they rule; and subjection to a foreign government of this
description, notwithstanding its inevitable evils, is often of the
greatest advantage to a people, carrying them rapidly through several
stages of progress, and clearing away obstacles to improvement which
might have lasted indefinitely if the subject population had been left
unassisted to its native tendencies and chances. In a country not
under the dominion of foreigners, the only cause adequate to producing
similar benefits is the rare accident of a monarch of extraordinary
genius. There have been in history a few of these who, happily for
humanity, have reigned long enough to render some of their
improvements permanent, by leaving them under the guardianship of a
generation which had grown up under their influence. Charlemagne may
be cited as one instance; Peter the Great is another. Such examples
however are so unfrequent that they can only be classed with the happy
accidents which have so often decided at a critical moment whether
some leading portion of humanity should make a sudden start, or sink
back towards barbarism--chances like the existence of Themistocles at
the time of the Persian invasion, or of the first or third William of
Orange. It would be absurd to construct institutions for the mere
purpose of taking advantage of such possibilities, especially as men
of this calibre, in any distinguished position, do not require
despotic power to enable them to exert great influence, as is
evidenced by the three last mentioned. The case most requiring
consideration in reference to institutions is the not very uncommon
one in which a small but leading portion of the population, from
difference of race, more civilized origin, or other peculiarities of
circumstance, are markedly superior in civilization and general
character to the remainder. Under those conditions, government by the
representatives of the mass would stand a chance of depriving them of
much of the benefit they might derive from the greater civilization of
the superior ranks, while government by the representatives of those
ranks would probably rivet the degradation of the multitude, and leave
them no hope of decent treatment except by ridding themselves of one
of the most valuable elements of future advancement. The best prospect
of improvement for a people thus composed lies in the existence of a
constitutionally unlimited, or at least a practically preponderant
authority in the chief ruler of the dominant class. He alone has by
his position an interest in raising and improving the mass, of whom he
is not jealous, as a counterpoise to his associates, of whom he is;
and if fortunate circumstances place beside him, not as controllers
but as subordinates, a body representative of the superior caste,
which, by its objections and questionings, and by its occasional
outbreaks of spirit, keeps alive habits of collective resistance, and
may admit of being, in time and by degrees, expanded into a really
national representation (which is in substance the history of the
English Parliament), the nation has then the most favorable prospects
of improvement which can well occur to a community thus circumstanced
and constituted.

Among the tendencies which, without absolutely rendering a people
unfit for representative government, seriously incapacitate them from
reaping the full benefit of it, one deserves particular notice. There
are two states of the inclinations, intrinsically very different, but
which have something in common, by virtue of which they often coincide
in the direction they give to the efforts of individuals and of
nations; one is, the desire to exercise power over others; the other
is disinclination to have power exercised over themselves. The
difference between different portions of mankind in the relative
strength of these two dispositions is one of the most important
elements in their history. There are nations in whom the passion for
governing others is so much stronger than the desire of personal
independence, that for the mere shadow of the one they are found ready
to sacrifice the whole of the other. Each one of their number is
willing, like the private soldier in an army, to abdicate his personal
freedom of action into the hands of his general, provided the army is
triumphant and victorious, and he is able to flatter himself that he
is one of a conquering host, though the notion that he has himself any
share in the domination exercised over the conquered is an illusion. A
government strictly limited in its powers and attributions, required
to hold its hands from overmeddling, and to let most things go on
without its assuming the part of guardian or director, is not to the
taste of such a people; in their eyes the possessors of authority can
hardly take too much upon themselves, provided the authority itself is
open to general competition. An average individual among them prefers
the chance, however distant or improbable, of wielding some share of
power over his fellow-citizens, above the certainty, to himself and
others, of having no unnecessary power exercised over them. These are
the elements of a people of place-hunters, in whom the course of
politics is mainly determined by place-hunting; where equality alone
is cared for, but not liberty; where the contests of political parties
are but struggles to decide whether the power of meddling in every
thing shall belong to one class or another, perhaps merely to one knot
of public men or another; where the idea entertained of democracy is
merely that of opening offices to the competition of all instead of a
few; where, the more popular the institutions, the more innumerable
are the places created, and the more monstrous the overgovernment
exercised by all over each, and by the executive over all. It would be
as unjust as it would be ungenerous to offer this, or any thing
approaching to it, as an unexaggerated picture of the French people;
yet the degree in which they do participate in this type of character
has caused representative government by a limited class to break down
by excess of corruption, and the attempt at representative government
by the whole male population to end in giving one man the power of
consigning any number of the rest, without trial, to Lambessa or
Cayenne, provided he allows all of them to think themselves not
excluded from the possibility of sharing his favors. The point of
character which, beyond any other, fits the people of this country for
representative government, is that they have almost universally the
contrary characteristic. They are very jealous of any attempt to
exercise power over them not sanctioned by long usage and by their own
opinion of right; but they in general care very little for the
exercise of power over others. Not having the smallest sympathy with
the passion for governing, while they are but too well acquainted with
the motives of private interest from which that office is sought, they
prefer that it should be performed by those to whom it comes without
seeking, as a consequence of social position. If foreigners understood
this, it would account to them for some of the apparent contradictions
in the political feelings of Englishmen; their unhesitating readiness
to let themselves be governed by the higher classes, coupled with so
little personal subservience to them, that no people are so fond of
resisting authority when it oversteps certain prescribed limits, or so
determined to make their rulers always remember that they will only be
governed in the way they themselves like best. Place-hunting,
accordingly, is a form of ambition to which the English, considered
nationally, are almost strangers. If we except the few families or
connections of whom official employment lies directly in the way,
Englishmen's views of advancement in life take an altogether different
direction--that of success in business or in a profession. They have
the strongest distaste for any mere struggle for office by political
parties or individuals; and there are few things to which they have a
greater aversion than to the multiplication of public employments; a
thing, on the contrary, always popular with the bureaucracy-ridden
nations of the Continent, who would rather pay higher taxes than
diminish, by the smallest fraction, their individual chances of a
place for themselves or their relatives, and among whom a cry for
retrenchment never means abolition of offices, but the reduction of
the salaries of those which are too considerable for the ordinary
citizen to have any chance of being appointed to them.



Chapter V--Of the Proper Functions of Representative Bodies.


In treating of representative government, it is above all necessary to
keep in view the distinction between its idea or essence, and the
particular forms in which the idea has been clothed by accidental
historical developments, or by the notions current at some particular
period.

The meaning of representative government is, that the whole people, or
some numerous portion of them, exercise through deputies periodically
elected by themselves the ultimate controlling power, which, in every
constitution, must reside somewhere. This ultimate power they must
possess in all its completeness. They must be masters, whenever they
please, of all the operations of government. There is no need that the
constitutional law should itself give them this mastery. It does not
in the British Constitution. But what it does give practically amounts
to this: the power of final control is as essentially single, in a
mixed and balanced government, as in a pure monarchy or democracy.
This is the portion of truth in the opinion of the ancients, revived
by great authorities in our own time, that a balanced constitution is
impossible. There is almost always a balance, but the scales never
hang exactly even. Which of them preponderates is not always apparent
on the face of the political institutions. In the British
Constitution, each of the three co-ordinate members of the sovereignty
is invested with powers which, if fully exercised, would enable it to
stop all the machinery of government. Nominally, therefore, each is
invested with equal power of thwarting and obstructing the others; and
if, by exerting that power, any of the three could hope to better its
position, the ordinary course of human affairs forbids us to doubt
that the power would be exercised. There can be no question that the
full powers of each would be employed defensively if it found itself
assailed by one or both of the others. What, then, prevents the same
powers from being exerted aggressively? The unwritten maxims of the
Constitution--in other words, the positive political morality of the
country; and this positive political morality is what we must look to
if we would know in whom the really supreme power in the Constitution
resides.

By constitutional law, the crown can refuse its assent to any act of
Parliament, and can appoint to office and maintain in it any minister,
in opposition to the remonstrances of Parliament. But the
constitutional morality of the country nullifies these powers,
preventing them from being ever used; and, by requiring that the head
of the administration should always be virtually appointed by the
House of Commons, makes that body the real sovereign of the state.

These unwritten rules, which limit the use of lawful powers, are,
however, only effectual, and maintain themselves in existence on
condition of harmonising with the actual distribution of real
political strength. There is in every constitution a strongest
power--one which would gain the victory if the compromises by which
the Constitution habitually works were suspended, and there came a
trial of strength. Constitutional maxims are adhered to, and are
practically operative, so long as they give the predominance in the
Constitution to that one of the powers which has the preponderance of
active power out of doors. This, in England, is the popular power. If,
therefore, the legal provisions of the British Constitution, together
with the unwritten maxims by which the conduct of the different
political authorities is in fact regulated, did not give to the
popular element in the Constitution that substantial supremacy over
every department of the government which corresponds to its real power
in the country, the Constitution would not possess the stability which
characterizes it; either the laws or the unwritten maxims would soon
have to be changed. The British government is thus a representative
government in the correct sense of the term; and the powers which it
leaves in hands not directly accountable to the people can only be
considered as precautions which the ruling power is willing should be
taken against its own errors. Such precautions have existed in all
well-constructed democracies. The Athenian Constitution had many such
provisions, and so has that of the United States.

But while it is essential to representative government that the
practical supremacy in the state should reside in the representatives
of the people, it is an open question what actual functions, what
precise part in the machinery of government, shall be directly and
personally discharged by the representative body. Great varieties in
this respect are compatible with the essence of representative
government, provided the functions are such as secure to the
representative body the control of every thing in the last resort.

There is a radical distinction between controlling the business of
government and actually doing it. The same person or body may be able
to control every thing, but can not possibly do every thing; and in
many cases its control over every thing will be more perfect the less
it personally attempts to do. The commander of an army could not
direct its movements effectually if he himself fought in the ranks or
led an assault. It is the same with bodies of men. Some things can not
be done except by bodies; other things can not be well done by them.
It is one question, therefore, what a popular assembly should control,
another what it should itself do. It should, as we have already seen,
control all the operations of government. But, in order to determine
through what channel this general control may most expediently be
exercised, and what portion of the business of government the
representative assembly should hold in its own hands, it is necessary
to consider what kinds of business a numerous body is competent to
perform properly. That alone which it can do well it ought to take
personally upon itself. With regard to the rest, its proper province
is not to do it, but to take means for having it well done by others.

For example, the duty which is considered as belonging more peculiarly
than any other to an assembly representative of the people is that of
voting the taxes. Nevertheless, in no country does the representative
body undertake, by itself or its delegated officers, to prepare the
estimates. Though the supplies can only be voted by the House of
Commons, and though the sanction of the House is also required for the
appropriation of the revenues to the different items of the public
expenditure, it is the maxim and the uniform practice of the
Constitution that money can be granted only on the proposition of the
crown. It has, no doubt, been felt that moderation as to the amount,
and care and judgment in the detail of its application, can only be
expected when the executive government, through whose hands it is to
pass, is made responsible for the plans and calculations on which the
disbursements are grounded. Parliament, accordingly, is not expected,
nor even permitted, to originate directly either taxation or
expenditure. All it is asked for is its consent, and the sole power it
possesses is that of refusal.

The principles which are involved and recognized in this
constitutional doctrine, if followed as far as they will go, are a
guide to the limitation and definition of the general functions of
representative assemblies. In the first place, it is admitted in all
countries in which the representative system is practically
understood, that numerous representative bodies ought not to
administer. The maxim is grounded not only on the most essential
principles of good government, but on those of the successful conduct
of business of any description. No body of men, unless organized and
under command, is fit for action, in the proper sense. Even a select
board, composed of few members, and these specially conversant with
the business to be done, is always an inferior instrument to some one
individual who could be found among them, and would be improved in
character if that one person were made the chief, and all the others
reduced to subordinates. What can be done better by a body than by any
individual is deliberation. When it is necessary or important to
secure hearing and consideration to many conflicting opinions, a
deliberative body is indispensable. Those bodies, therefore, are
frequently useful, even for administrative business, but in general
only as advisers; such business being, as a rule, better conducted
under the responsibility of one. Even a joint-stock company has always
in practice, if not in theory, a managing director; its good or bad
management depends essentially on some one person's qualifications,
and the remaining directors, when of any use, are so by their
suggestions to him, or by the power they possess of watching him, and
restraining or removing him in case of misconduct. That they are
ostensibly equal shares with him in the management is no advantage,
but a considerable set-off against any good which they are capable of
doing: it weakens greatly the sense in his own mind, and in those of
other people, of that individual responsibility in which he should
stand forth personally and undividedly.

But a popular assembly is still less fitted to administer, or to
dictate in detail to those who have the charge of administration. Even
when honestly meant, the interference is almost always injurious.
Every branch of public administration is a skilled business, which has
its own peculiar principles and traditional rules, many of them not
even known in any effectual way, except to those who have at some time
had a hand in carrying on the business, and none of them likely to be
duly appreciated by persons not practically acquainted with the
department. I do not mean that the transaction of public business has
esoteric mysteries, only to be understood by the initiated. Its
principles are all intelligible to any person of good sense, who has
in his mind a true picture of the circumstances and conditions to be
dealt with; but to have this he must know those circumstances and
conditions; and the knowledge does not come by intuition. There are
many rules of the greatest importance in every branch of public
business (as there are in every private occupation), of which a person
fresh to the subject neither knows the reason or even suspects the
existence, because they are intended to meet dangers or provide
against inconveniences which never entered into his thoughts. I have
known public men, ministers of more than ordinary natural capacity,
who, on their first introduction to a department of business new to
them, have excited the mirth of their inferiors by the air with which
they announced as a truth hitherto set at nought, and brought to light
by themselves, something which was probably the first thought of every
body who ever looked at the subject, given up as soon as he had got on
to a second. It is true that a great statesman is he who knows when to
depart from traditions, as well as when to adhere to them; but it is a
great mistake to suppose that he will do this better for being
ignorant of the traditions. No one who does not thoroughly know the
modes of action which common experience has sanctioned is capable of
judging of the circumstances which require a departure from those
ordinary modes of action. The interests dependent on the acts done by
a public department, the consequences liable to follow from any
particular mode of conducting it, require for weighing and estimating
them a kind of knowledge, and of specially exercised judgment, almost
as rarely found in those not bred to it, as the capacity to reform the
law in those who have not professionally studied it. All these
difficulties are sure to be ignored by a representative assembly which
attempts to decide on special acts of administration. At its best, it
is inexperience sitting in judgment on experience, ignorance on
knowledge; ignorance which, never suspecting the existence of what it
does not know, is equally careless and supercilious, making light of,
if not resenting, all pretensions to have a judgment better worth
attending to than its own. Thus it is when no interested motives
intervene; but when they do, the result is jobbery more unblushing and
audacious than the worst corruption which can well take place in a
public office under a government of publicity. It is not necessary
that the interested bias should extend to the majority of the
assembly. In any particular case it is of ten enough that it affects
two or three of their number. Those two or three will have a greater
interest in misleading the body than any other of its members are
likely to have in putting it right. The bulk of the assembly may keep
their hands clean, but they can not keep their minds vigilant or their
judgments discerning in matters they know nothing about; and an
indolent majority, like an indolent individual, belongs to the person
who takes most pains with it. The bad measures or bad appointments of
a minister may be checked by Parliament; and the interest of ministers
in defending, and of rival partisans in attacking, secures a tolerably
equal discussion; but _quis custodiet custodes?_ who shall check the
Parliament? A minister, a head of an office, feels himself under some
responsibility. An assembly in such cases feels under no
responsibility at all; for when did any member of Parliament lose his
seat for the vote he gave on any detail of administration? To a
minister, or the head of an office, it is of more importance what will
be thought of his proceedings some time hence, than what is thought of
them at the instant; but an assembly, if the cry of the moment goes
with it, however hastily raised or artificially stirred up, thinks
itself and is thought by every body, to be completely exculpated,
however disastrous may be the consequences. Besides, an assembly never
personally experiences the inconveniences of its bad measures until
they have reached the dimensions of national evils. Ministers and
administrators see them approaching, and have to bear all the
annoyance and trouble of attempting to ward them off.

The proper duty of a representative assembly in regard to matters of
administration is not to decide them by its own vote, but to take care
that the persons who have to decide them shall be the proper persons.
Even this they can not advantageously do by nominating the
individuals. There is no act which more imperatively requires to be
performed under a strong sense of individual responsibility than the
nomination to employments. The experience of every person conversant
with public affairs bears out the assertion that there is scarcely any
act respecting which the conscience of an average man is less
sensitive; scarcely any case in which less consideration is paid to
qualifications, partly because men do not know, and partly because
they do not care for, the difference in qualifications between one
person and another. When a minister makes what is meant to be an
honest appointment, that is, when he does not actually job it for his
personal connections or his party, an ignorant person might suppose
that he would try to give it to the person best qualified. No such
thing. An ordinary minister thinks himself a miracle of virtue if he
gives it to a person of merit, or who has a claim on the public on any
account, though the claim or the merit may be of the most opposite
description to that required. _Il fallait un calculateur, ce fut un
danseur qui l'obtint_, is hardly more of a caricature than in the days
of Figaro; and the minister doubtless thinks himself not only
blameless, but meritorious, if the man dances well. Besides, the
qualifications which fit special individuals for special duties can
only be recognized by those who know the individuals, or who make it
their business to examine and judge of persons from what they have
done, or from the evidence of those who are in a position to judge.
When these conscientious obligations are so little regarded by great
public officers who can be made responsible for their appointments,
how must it be with assemblies who can not? Even now, the worst
appointments are those which are made for the sake of gaining support
or disarming opposition in the representative body; what might we
expect if they were made by the body itself? Numerous bodies never
regard special qualifications at all. Unless a man is fit for the
gallows, he is thought to be about as fit as other people for almost
any thing for which he can offer himself as a candidate. When
appointments made by a public body are not decided, as they almost
always are, by party connection or private jobbing, a man is appointed
either because he has a reputation, often quite undeserved, for
_general_ ability, or oftener for no better reason than that he is
personally popular.

It has never been thought desirable that Parliament should itself
nominate even the members of a cabinet. It is enough that it virtually
decides who shall be prime minister, or who shall be the two or three
individuals from whom the prime minister shall be chosen. In doing
this, it merely recognizes the fact that a certain person is the
candidate of the party whose general policy commands its support. In
reality, the only thing which Parliament decides is, which of two, or
at most three, parties or bodies of men shall furnish the executive
government: the opinion of the party itself decides which of its
members is fittest to be placed at the head. According to the existing
practice of the British Constitution, these things seem to be on as
good a footing as they can be. Parliament does not nominate any
minister, but the crown appoints the head of the administration in
conformity to the general wishes and inclinations manifested by
Parliament, and the other ministers on the recommendation of the
chief; while every minister has the undivided moral responsibility of
appointing fit persons to the other offices of administration which
are not permanent. In a republic, some other arrangement would be
necessary; but the nearer it approached in practice to that which has
long existed in England, the more likely it would be to work well.
Either, as in the American republic, the head of the executive must be
elected by some agency entirely independent of the representative
body; or the body must content itself with naming the prime minister,
and making him responsible for the choice of his associates and
subordinates. In all these considerations, at least theoretically, I
fully anticipate a general assent; though, practically, the tendency
is strong in representative bodies to interfere more and more in the
details of administration, by virtue of the general law, that whoever
has the strongest power is more and more tempted to make an excessive
use of it; and this is one of the practical dangers to which the
futurity of representative governments will be exposed.

But it is equally true, though only of late and slowly beginning to be
acknowledged, that a numerous assembly is as little fitted for the
direct business of legislation as for that of administration. There is
hardly any kind of intellectual work which so much needs to be done
not only by experienced and exercised minds, but by minds trained to
the task through long and laborious study, as the business of making
laws. This is a sufficient reason, were there no other, why they can
never be well made but by a committee of very few persons. A reason no
less conclusive is, that every provision of a law requires to be
framed with the most accurate and long-sighted perception of its
effect on all the other provisions; and the law when made should be
capable of fitting into a consistent whole with the previously
existing laws. It is impossible that these conditions should be in any
degree fulfilled when laws are voted clause by clause in a
miscellaneous assembly. The incongruity of such a mode of legislating
would strike all minds, were it not that our laws are already, as to
form and construction, such a chaos, that the confusion and
contradiction seem incapable of being made greater by any addition to
the mass. Yet even now, the utter unfitness of our legislative
machinery for its purpose is making itself practically felt every year
more and more. The mere time necessarily occupied in getting through
bills, renders Parliament more and more incapable of passing any,
except on detached and narrow points. If a bill is prepared which even
attempts to deal with the whole of any subject (and it is impossible
to legislate properly on any part without having the whole present to
the mind), it hangs over from session to session through sheer
impossibility of finding time to dispose of it. It matters not though
the bill may have been deliberately drawn up by the authority deemed
the best qualified, with all appliances and means to boot; or by a
select commission, chosen for their conversancy with the subject, and
having employed years in considering and digesting the particular
measure: it can not be passed, because the House of Commons will not
forego the precious privilege of tinkering it with their clumsy hands.
The custom has of late been to some extent introduced, when the
principle of a bill has been affirmed on the second reading, of
referring it for consideration in detail to a select committee; but it
has not been found that this practice causes much less time to be lost
afterwards in carrying it through the committee of the whole House:
the opinions or private crotchets which have been overruled by
knowledge always insist on giving themselves a second chance before
the tribunal of ignorance. Indeed, the practice itself has been
adopted principally by the House of Lords, the members of which are
less busy and fond of meddling, and less jealous of the importance of
their individual voices, than those of the elective House. And when a
bill of many clauses does succeed in getting itself discussed in
detail, what can depict the state in which it comes out of committee!
Clauses omitted which are essential to the working of the rest;
incongruous ones inserted to conciliate some private interest, or some
crotchety member who threatens to delay the bill; articles foisted in
on the motion of some sciolist with a mere smattering of the subject,
leading to consequences which the member who introduced or those who
supported the bill did not at the moment foresee, and which need an
amending act in the next session to correct their mischiefs. It is one
of the evils of the present mode of managing these things, that the
explaining and defending of a bill, and of its various provisions, is
scarcely ever performed by the person from whose mind they emanated,
who probably has not a seat in the House. Their defense rests upon
some minister or member of Parliament who did not frame them, who is
dependent on cramming for all his arguments but those which are
perfectly obvious, who does not know the full strength of his case,
nor the best reasons by which to support it, and is wholly incapable
of meeting unforeseen objections. This evil, as far as government
bills are concerned, admits of remedy, and has been remedied in some
representative constitutions, by allowing the government to be
represented in either House by persons in its confidence, having a
right to speak, though not to vote.

If that, as yet considerable, majority of the House of Commons who
never desire to move an amendment or make a speech would no longer
leave the whole regulation of business to those who do; if they would
bethink themselves that better qualifications for legislation exist,
and may be found if sought for, than a fluent tongue, and the faculty
of getting elected by a constituency, it would soon be recognized
that, in legislation as well as administration, the only task to which
a representative assembly can possibly be competent is not that of
doing the work, but of causing it to be done; of determining to whom
or to what sort of people it shall be confided, and giving or
withholding the national sanction to it when performed. Any government
fit for a high state of civilization would have as one of its
fundamental elements a small body, not exceeding in number the members
of a cabinet, who should act as a Commission of Legislation, having
for its appointed office to make the laws. If the laws of this country
were, as surely they will soon be, revised and put into a connected
form, the Commission of Codification by which this is effected should
remain as a permanent institution, to watch over the work, protect it
from deterioration, and make further improvements as often as
required. No one would wish that this body should of itself have any
power of _enacting_ laws; the Commission would only embody the element
of intelligence in their construction; Parliament would represent that
of will. No measure would become a law until expressly sanctioned by
Parliament; and Parliament, or either house, would have the power not
only of rejecting but of sending back a bill to the commission for
reconsideration or improvement. Either house might also exercise its
initiative by referring any subject to the commission, with directions
to prepare a law. The commission, of course, would have no power of
refusing its instrumentality to any legislation which the country
desired. Instructions, concurred in by both houses, to draw up a bill
which should effect a particular purpose, would be imperative on the
commissioners, unless they preferred to resign their office. Once
framed, however, Parliament should have no power to alter the measure,
but solely to pass or reject it; or, if partially disapproved of,
remit it to the commission for reconsideration. The commissioners
should be appointed by the crown, but should hold their offices for a
time certain, say five years, unless removed on an address from the
two Houses of Parliament, grounded either on personal misconduct (as
in the case of judges), or on refusal to draw up a bill in obedience
to the demands of Parliament. At the expiration of the five years a
member should cease to hold office unless reappointed, in order to
provide a convenient mode of getting rid of those who had not been
found equal to their duties, and of infusing new and younger blood
into the body.

The necessity of some provision corresponding to this was felt even in
the Athenian Democracy, where, in the time of its most complete
ascendancy, the popular Ecclesia could pass psephisms (mostly decrees
on single matters of policy), but laws, so called, could only be made
or altered by a different and less numerous body, renewed annually,
called the Nomothetæ, whose duty it also was to revise the whole of
the laws, and keep them consistent with one another. In the English
Constitution there is great difficulty in introducing any arrangement
which is new both in form and in substance, but comparatively little
repugnance is felt to the attainment of new purposes by an adaptation
of existing forms and traditions. It appears to me that the means
might be devised of enriching the Constitution with this great
improvement through the machinery of the House of Lords. A commission
for preparing bills would in itself be no more an innovation on the
Constitution than the Board for the administration of the Poor Laws,
or the Inclosure Commission. If, in consideration of the great
importance and dignity of the trust, it were made a rule that every
person appointed a member of the Legislative Commission, unless
removed from office on an address from Parliament, should be a peer
for life, it is probable that the same good sense and taste which
leave the judicial functions of the peerage practically to the
exclusive care of the law lords would leave the business of
legislation, except on questions involving political principles and
interests, to the professional legislators; that bills originating in
the Upper House would always be drawn up by them; that the government
would devolve on them the framing of all its bills; and that private
members of the House of Commons would gradually find it convenient,
and likely to facilitate the passing of their measures through the two
houses, if, instead of bringing in a bill and submitting it directly
to the house, they obtained leave to introduce it and have it referred
to the Legislative Commission; for it would, of course, be open to the
House to refer for the consideration of that body not a subject
merely, but any specific proposal, or a Draft of a Bill _in extenso_,
when any member thought himself capable of preparing one such as ought
to pass; and the House would doubtless refer every such draft to the
commission, if only as materials, and for the benefit of the
suggestions it might contain, as they would, in like manner, refer
every amendment or objection which might be proposed in writing by any
member of the House after a measure had left the commissioners' hands.
The alteration of bills by a committee of the whole House would cease,
not by formal abolition, but by desuetude; the right not being
abandoned, but laid up in the same armoury with the royal veto, the
right of withholding the supplies, and other ancient instruments of
political warfare, which no one desires to see used, but no one likes
to part with, lest they should any time be found to be still needed in
an extraordinary emergency. By such arrangements as these, legislation
would assume its proper place as a work of skilled labor and special
study and experience; while the most important liberty of the nation,
that of being governed only by laws assented to by its elected
representatives, would be fully preserved, and made more valuable by
being detached from the serious, but by no means unavoidable drawbacks
which now accompany it in the form of ignorant and ill-considered
legislation.

Instead of the function of governing, for which it is radically unfit,
the proper office of a representative assembly is to watch and control
the government; to throw the light of publicity on its acts; to compel
a full exposition and justification of all of them which any one
considers questionable; to cinsure them if found condemnable, and, if
the men who compose the government abuse their trust, or fulfill it in
a manner which conflicts with the deliberate sense of the nation, to
expel them from office, and either expressly or virtually appoint
their successors. This is surely ample power, and security enough for
the liberty of the nation. In addition to this, the Parliament has an
office not inferior even to this in importance; to be at once the
nation's Committee of Grievances and its Congress of Opinions; an
arena in which not only the general opinion of the nation, but that of
every section of it, and, as far as possible, of every eminent
individual whom it contains, can produce itself in full light and
challenge discussion; where every person in the country may count upon
finding somebody who speaks his mind as well or better than he could
speak it himself--not to friends and partisans exclusively, but in the
face of opponents, to be tested by adverse controversy; where those
whose opinion is overruled, feel satisfied that it is heard, and set
aside not by a mere act of will, but for what are thought superior
reasons, and commend themselves as such to the representatives of the
majority of the nation; where every party or opinion in the country
can muster its strength, and be cured of any illusion concerning the
number or power of its adherents; where the opinion which prevails in
the nation makes itself manifest as prevailing, and marshals its hosts
in the presence of the government, which is thus enabled and compelled
to give way to it on the mere manifestation, without the actual
employment of its strength; where statesmen can assure themselves, far
more certainly than by any other signs, what elements of opinion and
power are growing and what declining, and are enabled to shape their
measures with some regard not solely to present exigencies, but to
tendencies in progress. Representative assemblies are often taunted by
their enemies with being places of mere talk and _bavardage_. There
has seldom been more misplaced derision. I know not how a
representative assembly can more usefully employ itself than in talk,
when the subject of talk is the great public interests of the country,
and every sentence of it represents the opinion either of some
important body of persons in the nation, or of an individual in whom
some such body have reposed their confidence. A place where every
interest and shade of opinion in the country can have its cause even
passionately pleaded, in the face of the government and of all other
interests and opinions, can compel them to listen, and either comply,
or state clearly why they do not, is in itself, if it answered no
other purpose, one of the most important political institutions that
can exist any where, and one of the foremost benefits of free
government. Such "talking" would never be looked upon with
disparagement if it were not allowed to stop "doing"; which it never
would, if assemblies knew and acknowledged that talking and discussion
are their proper business, while _doing_, as the result of discussion,
is the task not of a miscellaneous body, but of individuals specially
trained to it; that the fit office of an assembly is to see that those
individuals are honestly and intelligently chosen, and to interfere no
further with them, except by unlimited latitude of suggestion and
criticism, and by applying or withholding the final seal of national
assent. It is for want of this judicious reserve that popular
assemblies attempt to do what they can not do well--to govern and
legislate--and provide no machinery but their own for much of it, when
of course every hour spent in talk is an hour withdrawn from actual
business. But the very fact which most unfits such bodies for a
council of legislation, qualifies them the more for their other
office--namely, that they are not a selection of the greatest
political minds in the country, from whose opinions little could with
certainty be inferred concerning those of the nation, but are, when
properly constituted, a fair sample of every grade of intellect among
the people which is at all entitled to a voice in public affairs.
Their part is to indicate wants, to be an organ for popular demands,
and a place of adverse discussion for all opinions relating to public
matters, both great and small; and, along with this, to check by
criticism, and eventually by withdrawing their support, those high
public officers who really conduct the public business, or who appoint
those by whom it is conducted. Nothing but the restriction of the
function of representative bodies within these rational limits will
enable the benefits of popular control to be enjoyed in conjunction
with the no less important requisites (growing ever more important as
human affairs increase in scale and in complexity) of skilled
legislation and administration. There are no means of combining these
benefits except by separating the functions which guaranty the one
from those which essentially require the other; by disjoining the
office of control and criticism from the actual conduct of affairs,
and devolving the former on the representatives of the Many, while
securing for the latter, under strict responsibility to the nation,
the acquired knowledge and practiced intelligence of a specially
trained and experienced Few.

The preceding discussion of the functions which ought to devolve on
the sovereign representative assembly of the nation would require to
be followed by an inquiry into those properly vested in the minor
representative bodies, which ought to exist for purposes that regard
only localities. And such an inquiry forms an essential part of the
present treatise; but many reasons require its postponement, until we
have considered the most proper composition of the great
representative body, destined to control as sovereign the enactment of
laws and the administration of the general affairs of the nation.



Chapter VI--Of the Infirmities and Dangers to which Representative Government is Liable.


The defects of any form of government may be either negative or
positive. It is negatively defective if it does not concentrate in the
hands of the authorities power sufficient to fulfill the necessary
offices of a government, or if it does not sufficiently develop by
exercise the active capacities and social feelings of the individual
citizens. On neither of these points is it necessary that much should
be said at this stage of our inquiry.

The want of an amount power in the government adequate to preserve
order and allow of progress in the people is incident rather to a wild
and rude state of society generally than to any particular form of
political union. When the people are too much attached to savage
independence to be tolerant of the amount of power to which it is for
their good that they should be subject, the state of society (as
already observed) is not yet ripe for representative government. When
the time for that government has arrived, sufficient power for all
needful purposes is sure to reside in the sovereign assembly; and if
enough of it is not intrusted to the executive, this can only arise
from a jealous feeling on the part of the assembly toward the
administration, never likely to exist but where the constitutional
power of the assembly to turn them out of office has not yet
sufficiently established itself. Wherever that constitutional right is
admitted in principle and fully operative in practice, there is no
fear that the assembly will not be willing to trust its own ministers
with any amount of power really desirable; the danger is, on the
contrary, lest they should grant it too ungrudgingly, and too
indefinite in extent, since the power of the minister is the power of
the body who make and who keep him so. It is, however, very likely,
and is one of the dangers of a controlling assembly, that it may be
lavish of powers, but afterwards interfere with their exercise; may
give power by wholesale, and take it back in detail, by multiplied
single acts of interference in the business of administration. The
evils arising from this assumption of the actual function of
governing, in lieu of that of criticising and checking those who
govern, have been sufficiently dwelt upon in the preceding chapter. No
safeguard can in the nature of things be provided against this
improper meddling, except a strong and general conviction of its
injurious character.

The other negative defect which may reside in a government, that of
not bringing into sufficient exercise the individual faculties, moral,
intellectual, and active, of the people, has been exhibited generally
in setting forth the distinctive mischiefs of despotism. As between
one form of popular government and another, the advantage in this
respect lies with that which most widely diffuses the exercise of
public functions; on the one hand, by excluding fewest from the
suffrage; on the other, by opening to all classes of private citizens,
so far as is consistent with other equally important objects, the
widest participation in the details of judicial and administrative
business; as by jury-trial, admission to municipal offices, and, above
all, by the utmost possible publicity and liberty of discussion,
whereby not merely a few individuals in succession, but the whole
public, are made, to a certain extent, participants in the government,
and sharers in the instruction and mental exercise derived from it.
The further illustration of these benefits, as well as of the
limitations under which they must be aimed at, will be better deferred
until we come to speak of the details of administration.

The _positive_ evils and dangers of the representative, as of every
other form of government, may be reduced to two heads: first, general
ignorance and incapacity, or, to speak more moderately, insufficient
mental qualifications, in the controlling body; secondly, the danger
of its being under the influence of interests not identical with the
general welfare of the community.

The former of these evils, deficiency in high mental qualifications,
is one to which it is generally supposed that popular government is
liable in a greater degree than any other. The energy of a monarch,
the steadiness and prudence of an aristocracy, are thought to contrast
most favorably with the vacillation and shortsightedness of even the
most qualified democracy. These propositions, however, are not by any
means so well founded as they at first sight appear.

Compared with simple monarchy, representative government is in these
respects at no disadvantage. Except in a rude age, hereditary
monarchy, when it is really such, and not aristocracy in disguise, far
surpasses democracy in all the forms of incapacity supposed to be
characteristic of the last. I say, except in a rude age, because in a
really rude state of society there is a considerable guaranty for the
intellectual and active capacities of the sovereign. His personal will
is constantly encountering obstacles from the willfulness of his
subjects, and of powerful individuals among their number. The
circumstances of society do not afford him much temptation to mere
luxurious self-indulgence; mental and bodily activity, especially
political and military, are his principal excitements; and among
turbulent chiefs and lawless followers he has little authority, and is
seldom long secure even of his throne, unless he possesses a
considerable amount of personal daring, dexterity, and energy. The
reason why the average of talent is so high among the Henries and
Edwards of our history may be read in the tragical fate of the second
Edward and the second Richard, and the civil wars and disturbances of
the reigns of John and his incapable successor. The troubled period of
the Reformation also produced several eminent hereditary
monarchs--Elizabeth, Henri Quatre, Gustavus Adolphus; but they were
mostly bred up in adversity, succeeded to the throne by the unexpected
failure of nearer heirs, or had to contend with great difficulties in
the commencement of their reign. Since European life assumed a settled
aspect, any thing above mediocrity in an hereditary king has become
extremely rare, while the general average has been even below
mediocrity, both in talent and in vigor of character. A monarchy
constitutionally absolute now only maintains itself in existence
(except temporarily in the hands of some active-minded usurper)
through the mental qualifications of a permanent bureaucracy. The
Russian and Austrian governments, and even the French government in
its normal condition, are oligarchies of officials, of whom the head
of the state does little more than select the chiefs. I am speaking of
the regular course of their administration; for the will of the master
of course determines many of their particular acts.

The governments which have been remarkable in history for sustained
mental ability and vigor in the conduct of affairs have generally been
aristocracies. But they have been, without any exception,
aristocracies of public functionaries. The ruling bodies have been so
narrow, that each member, or at least each influential member of the
body, was able to make, and did make, public business an active
profession, and the principal occupation of his life. The only
aristocracies which have manifested high governing capacities, and
acted on steady maxims of policy through many generations, are those
of Rome and Venice. But, at Venice, though the privileged order was
numerous, the actual management of affairs was rigidly concentrated in
a small oligarchy within the oligarchy, whose whole lives were devoted
to the study and conduct of the affairs of the state. The Roman
government partook more of the character of an open aristocracy like
our own. But the really governing body, the Senate, was in exclusively
composed of persons who had exercised public functions, and had either
already filled, or were looking forward to fill the highest offices of
the state, at the peril of a severe responsibility in case of
incapacity and failure. When once members of the Senate, their lives
were pledged to the conduct of public affairs; they were not permitted
even to leave Italy except in the discharge of some public trust; and
unless turned out of the Senate by the censors for character or
conduct deemed disgraceful, they retained their powers and
responsibilities to the end of life. In an aristocracy thus
constituted, every member felt his personal importance entirely bound
up with the dignity and estimation of the commonwealth which he
administered, and with the part he was able to play in its councils.
This dignity and estimation were quite different things from the
prosperity or happiness of the general body of the citizens, and were
often wholly incompatible with it. But they were closely linked with
the external success and aggrandisement of the state; and it was,
consequently, in the pursuit of that object almost exclusively, that
either the Roman or the Venetian aristocracies manifested the
systematically wise collective policy and the great individual
capacities for government for which history has deservedly given them
credit.

It thus appears that the only governments, not representative, in
which high political skill and ability have been other than
exceptional, whether under monarchical or aristocratic forms, have
been essentially bureaucracies. The work of government has been in the
hands of governors by profession, which is the essence and meaning of
bureaucracy. Whether the work is done by them because they have been
trained to it, or they are trained to it because it is to be done by
them, makes a great difference in many respects, but none at all as to
the essential character of the rule. Aristocracies, on the other hand,
like that of England, in which the class who possessed the power
derived it merely from their social position, without being specially
trained or devoting themselves exclusively to it (and in which,
therefore, the power was not exercised directly, but through
representative institutions oligarchically constituted), have been, in
respect to intellectual endowments, much on a par with democracies;
that is, they have manifested such qualities in any considerable
degree only during the temporary ascendancy which great and popular
talents, united with a distinguished position, have given to some one
man. Themistocles and Pericles, Washington and Jefferson, were not
more completely exceptions in their several democracies, and were
assuredly much more splendid exceptions, than the Chathams and Peels
of the representative aristocracy of Great Britain, or even the Sullys
and Colberts of the aristocratic monarchy of France. A great minister,
in the aristocratic governments of modern Europe, is almost as rare a
phenomenon as a great king.

The comparison, therefore, as to the intellectual attributes of a
government has to be made between a representative democracy and a
bureaucracy; all other governments may be left out of the account. And
here it must be acknowledged that a bureaucratic government has, in
some important respects, greatly the advantage. It accumulates
experience, acquires well-tried and well-considered traditional
maxims, and makes provision for appropriate practical knowledge in
those who have the actual conduct of affairs. But it is not equally
favorable to individual energy of mind. The disease which afflicts
bureaucratic governments, and which they usually die of, is routine.
They perish by the immutability of their maxims, and, still more, by
the universal law that whatever becomes a routine loses its vital
principle, and, having no longer a mind acting within it, goes on
revolving mechanically, though the work it is intended to do remains
undone. A bureaucracy always tends to become a pedantocracy. When the
bureaucracy is the real government, the spirit of the corps (as with
the Jesuits) bears down the individuality of its more distinguished
members. In the profession of government, as in other professions, the
sole idea of the majority is to do what they have been taught; and it
requires a popular government to enable the conceptions of the man of
original genius among them to prevail over the obstructive spirit of
trained mediocrity. Only in a popular government (setting apart the
accident of a highly intelligent despot) could Sir Rowland Hill have
been victorious over the Post-office. A popular government installed
him _in_ the Post-office, and made the body, in spite of itself, obey
the impulse given by the man who united special knowledge with
individual vigor and originality. That the Roman aristocracy escaped
this characteristic disease of a bureaucracy was evidently owing to
its popular element. All special offices, both those which gave a seat
in the Senate and those which were sought by senators, were conferred
by popular election. The Russian government is a characteristic
exemplification of both the good and bad side of bureaucracy: its
fixed maxims, directed with Roman perseverance to the same
unflinchingly-pursued ends from age to age; the remarkable skill with
which those ends are generally pursued; the frightful internal
corruption, and the permanent organized hostility to improvements from
without, which even the autocratic power of a vigorous-minded emperor
is seldom or never sufficient to overcome; the patient obstructiveness
of the body being in the long run more than a match for the fitful
energy of one man. The Chinese government, a bureaucracy of Mandarins,
is, as far as known to us, another apparent example of the same
qualities and defects.

In all human affairs, conflicting influences are required to keep one
another alive and efficient even for their own proper uses; and the
exclusive pursuit of one good object, apart from some other which
should accompany it, ends not in excess of one and defect of the
other, but in the decay and loss even of that which has been
exclusively cared for. Government by trained officials can not do for
a country the things which can be done by a free government, but it
might be supposed capable of doing some things which free government
of itself can not do. We find, however, that an outside element of
freedom is necessary to enable it to do effectually or permanently
even its own business. And so, also, freedom can not produce its best
effects, and often breaks down altogether, unless means can be found
of combining it with trained and skilled administration. There could
not be a moment's hesitation between representative government, among
a people in any degree ripe for it, and the most perfect imaginable
bureaucracy. But it is, at the same time, one of the most important
ends of political institutions, to attain as many of the qualities of
the one as are consistent with the other; to secure, as far as they
can be made compatible, the great advantage of the conduct of affairs
by skilled persons, bred to it as an intellectual profession, along
with that of a general control vested in, and seriously exercised by,
bodies representative of the entire people. Much would be done towards
this end by recognizing the line of separation, discussed in the
preceding chapter, between the work of government properly so called,
which can only be well performed after special cultivation, and that
of selecting, watching, and, when needful, controlling the governors,
which in this case, as in all others, properly devolves, not on those
who do the work, but on those for whose benefit it ought to be done.
No progress at all can be made towards obtaining a skilled democracy,
unless the democracy are willing that the work which requires skill
should be done by those who possess it. A democracy has enough to do
in providing itself with an amount of mental competency sufficient for
its own proper work, that of superintendence and check.

How to obtain and secure this amount is one of the questions to taken
into consideration in judging of the proper constitution of a
representative body. In proportion as its composition fails to secure
this amount, the assembly will encroach, by special acts, on the
province of the executive; it will expel a good, or elevate and uphold
a bad ministry; it will connive at, or overlook in them, abuses of
trust, will be deluded by their false pretenses, or will withhold
support from those who endeavour to fulfill their trust
conscientiously; it will countenance or impose a selfish, a capricious
and impulsive, a short-sighted, ignorant, and prejudiced general
policy, foreign and domestic; it will abrogate good laws, or enact bad
ones; let in new evils, or cling with perverse obstinacy to old; it
will even, perhaps, under misleading impulses, momentary or permanent,
emanating from itself or from its constituents, tolerate or connive at
proceedings which set law aside altogether, in cases where equal
justice would not be agreeable to popular feeling. Such are among the
dangers of representative government, arising from a constitution of
the representation which does not secure an adequate amount of
intelligence and knowledge in the representative assembly.

We next proceed to the evils arising from the prevalence of modes of
action in the representative body, dictated by sinister interests (to
employ the useful phrase introduced by Bentham), that is, interests
conflicting more or less with the general good of the community.

It is universally admitted that, of the evils incident to monarchical
and aristocratic governments, a large proportion arise from this
cause. The interest of the monarch, or the interest of the
aristocracy, either collective or that of its individual members, is
promoted, or they themselves think that it will be promoted, by
conduct opposed to that which the general interest of the community
requires. The interest, for example, of the government is to tax
heavily; that of the community is to be as little taxed as the
necessary expenses of good government permit. The interest of the king
and of the governing aristocracy is to possess and exercise unlimited
power over the people; to enforce, on their part, complete conformity
to the will and preferences of the rulers. The interest of the people
is to have as little control exercised over them in any respect as is
consistent with attaining the legitimate ends of government. The
interest, or apparent and supposed interest of the king or
aristocracy, is to permit no censure of themselves, at least in any
form which they may consider either to threaten their power or
seriously to interfere with their free agency. The interest of the
people is that there should be full liberty of censure on every public
officer, and on every public act or measure. The interest of a ruling
class, whether in an aristocracy or an aristocratic monarchy, is to
assume to themselves an endless variety of unjust privileges,
sometimes benefiting their pockets at the expense of the people,
sometimes merely tending to exalt them above others, or, what is the
same thing in different words, to degrade others below themselves. If
the people are disaffected, which under such a government they are
very likely to be, it is the interest of the king or aristocracy to
keep them at a low level of intelligence and education, foment
dissensions among them, and even prevent them from being too well off,
lest they should "wax fat, and kick," agreeably to the maxim of
Cardinal Richelieu in his celebrated "Testament Politique." All these
things are for the interest of a king or aristocracy, in a purely
selfish point of view, unless a sufficiently strong counter-interest
is created by the fear of provoking resistance. All these evils have
been, and many of them still are, produced by the sinister interests
of kings and aristocracies, where their power is sufficient to raise
them above the opinion of the rest of the community; nor is it
rational to expect, as a consequence of such a position, any other
conduct.

These things are superabundantly evident in the case of a monarchy or
an aristocracy; but it is sometimes rather gratuitously assumed that
the same kind of injurious influences do not operate in a democracy.
Looking at democracy in the way in which it is commonly conceived, as
the rule of the numerical majority, it is surely possible that the
ruling power may be under the dominion of sectional or class
interests, pointing to conduct different from that which would be
dictated by impartial regard for the interest of all. Suppose the
majority to be whites, the minority negroes, or _vice versâ_: is it
likely that the majority would allow equal justice to the minority?
Suppose the majority Catholics, the minority Protestants, or the
reverse; will there not be the same danger? Or let the majority be
English, the minority Irish, or the contrary: is there not a great
probability of similar evil? In all countries there is a majority of
poor, a minority who, in contradistinction, may be called rich.
Between these two classes, on many questions, there is complete
opposition of apparent interest. We will suppose the majority
sufficiently intelligent to be aware that it is not for their
advantage to weaken the security of property, and that it would be
weakened by any act of arbitrary spoliation. But is there not a
considerable danger lest they should throw upon the possessors of what
is called realized property, and upon the larger incomes, an unfair
share, or even the whole, of the burden of taxation, and having done
so, add to the amount without scruple, expending the proceeds in modes
supposed to conduce to the profit and advantage of the laboring class?
Suppose, again, a minority of skilled laborers, a majority of
unskilled: the experience of many Trade Unions, unless they are
greatly calumniated, justifies the apprehension that equality of
earnings might be imposed as an obligation, and that piecework, and
all practices which enable superior industry or abilities to gain a
superior reward, might be put down. Legislative attempts to raise
wages, limitation of competition in the labor market, taxes or
restrictions on ma

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